FastHosts Review - A load of rubbish!
Here's an e-mail I got in response to telling FastHosts (for the third time) that my server was not well and that I was certain a disk was about to die (over several weeks so no sense of urgency here).
FastHosts don't seem to care - any good host such as, ORCS Web, Rackspace or UKFast would be in the server getting it sorted not trying to invoice me before they've even looked at the problem.
Bear in mind, I'm leasing a server from them and paying them £150 (roughly) a month.
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Dear Phil,
We couldn't see the delayed write error you sent in that attachment but I logged into your server and saw these delayed write errors.
This error is indicative of a hardware failure.
As such, you have a number of options, which include:
1. You can buy or borrow an additional drive from us. If you do this and are successful in setting a RAID mirror and then only 1 drive would be affected. If buying the drive we can then replace the faulty drive and you can then resynchronise the data from the good drive still in there, binning the original drive. If borrowing (we would do this for 7 days), you would then need to disable the RAID mirror afterwards.
Note that there is no guarantee that this process will resolve this issue but this sort of fix has worked in the past. Additionally, there is no guarantee that the drive will necessarily remain in a usable state for long enough for this to be put into place.
Please also note that if you want us to help setup the RAID mirror, you would need to pay a personal engineer service charge of £60+VAT, per 30 minutes or part thereof. There may be some downtime of services whilst these changes are made. If the original drive is still in it's original deployment condition of being a basic drive, rather than a dynamic drive, and there's a good deal of data on the drive then we would estimate that this would take at least 1 hours worth of personal engineer service work to complete.
2. If you have a backup of your data and/or want to get the server back up and running quickly, we can replace the faulty drive, building a fresh operating system install onto it and binning the original drive.
3. If you wish to try and recover data from the drive, if this is possible, we can put a new drive in the server (with your original drive removed) and rebuild a fresh operating system install onto it, take the server back offline to then re-attach your original drive. This can be left in there for a period of 7 days and after that time, we would then need to arrange a further time to take the server offline to remove the original drive.
Regards,
Chris Davis
Customer Support
Fasthosts Internet Ltd.
Fasthosts is registered in England and Wales.
Registered office: Discovery Court, 154 Southgate Street, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, UK. GL1 2EX