| Thanks and credit must go to : Matt, Alex, Rob and Enigma for extra info and link updates. Fasthosts (Bad, but not as ugly as birkenhead.net.)
Appalling commercial host in all respects. Offered a lot of features for very little cost. ASP, Coldfusion, Perl, unlimited everthing for (then) £300. They became an ongoing subject of web developement newsgroups and forums, with some rival companies gaining new accounts by offering "Special deals for ex-Fasthosts customers". Truly a laughing stock amongst web developers, network technicians in general and NT administrators in particular. They get more than just a mention on the alt.www.webmaster's "Web Hosts That Suck" list.
In their termination email they sent us the KAK virus, which ironically is an old script kiddie virus, well known, well documented, and easy to protect against. If this email was an accident then at that time they were running their own email system with no virus protection whatsoever, and still are not, as the problem has occurred again, with the same, but by now much older KAK script.
A Fasthosts forum is being maintained at SiteOnSite (registration required), where you will find current information on their Russian credit card fraud and recurring email virus situations, and recently a devastating report on a major security flaw reported by Daniel Sim. If you don't want to register here's a copy of my initial contribution.
Further information involving Fasthosts' credit card security problems can be found at The Register and in this follow up article.
The Register also has further details of the May 2001 Fasthosts vs BT outage dispute, and Google's Deja News search results now reveal a variety of discussions on the company.
...And finally (?): Here's one of the funniest Fasthosts excuses I've come across since we left.
...And sadly, you've been lucky. There's something even worse than Fasthosts in store for some web new-comers, the newer, the better. Some haven't even got computers yet? |
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