This article is more than 1 year old

Fasthosts redundancy redundant

User misery continues

Users of hosting service Fasthosts are complaining the service was unavailable again today - just days after an extended outage last week.

A director of a web design agency told us Fasthosts' service, which he described as being "up and down like a tarts" knickers, was down again this morning leaving 30 of his clients without available Web sites or email. Service was restored at 11am.

We have received several complaints about Fasthosts since we ran a story last week about a 36-hour outage to its service, with some people complaining service has not been restored to them yet.

Fasthosts blames BT for a slow response to the problem while BT blames Fasthosts for supplying it with incorrect information about a problem it blames on a spat between Fasthosts' customers that escalated to full-bloodied denial of service attacks.

While the exact cause of that outage still remains unclear (Fasthosts said it might be due to failure of a router managed on its behalf by BT), Fasthosts' customers have questioned why the network redundancy the hosting firm states it uses, didn't help lift the blackout.

On its Web site, Fasthosts said its Telewest connection "is completely independent of BT's network". It also said UUNet's "excellent service level guarantees to Fasthosts enable us to ensure your Internet service is available 100 per cent of the time".

Andrew Michael, Fasthosts managing director, said that the data flood which caused Fasthosts outage last week was targeted at its IP address which "means that it doesn't matter how much redundancy you have in your routing - all lines will be flooded".

"BT caused us a problem because they manage the router than announces our routes using BGP [Border Gateway Protocol]. That's the router that had to be modified to stop the data flood," he added. ®

Related stories:
Fasthosts outage outrage

External links:
Dejanews discussion on Fasthosts outage and service in general

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like