So I get up this morning over here in Australia, full of the usual joys of spring at the prospect of my early morning stats check. There’s nothing better than a cup of tea and some stats in bed (and no, I have nothing better to do in there in the mornings before some smart alec asks. I’m just that sad).
Soo…. with it being a strong holiday booking season in the UK I was quite excited to find out how yesterday had gone. It was the first day of what is known as the “Glasgow Fair” in Scotland. The start of the two weeks that many Glasgow workers still get off each year. “Some scope for a few wee last minute bookings” I thought, mentally rubbing my hands in anticipatory glee.
So I log into my first network (I check them in the same order each day). And…… Nothing. Zip, Nada, Hee Haw in the way of any holiday revenue. In fact, my overall revenue with them was down by about 60%.
You already know what happened from the title… but I only found out after I checked the A4UForum and discovered that Fasthosts had suffered a huge outage across many client sites (and even it’s own homepage) right at the time when affiliate sales tend to peak.
Here’s the e-mail they sent out some time later: -
16:24 - 21:00
We apologise unreservedly to those of our customers who suffered interruptions to their web, email and/or Broadband services earlier this evening. As soon as we were aware of the problem we diverted all available engineering resources to finding and implementing a solution. We were able to restore all services by 21:00, less than 4 hours after the problem was initially detected.
We realise that many of our customers depend on our services for their own businesses and that all of our customers expect and deserve a reliable and robust service from us. We sincerely regret that we were unable to prevent this issue and that some services were unavailable. Please be assured that we will thoroughly investigate the reasons behind this service interruption to ensure that the likelihood of similar problems in the future is minimised.
I find it hard to believe that a company the size of Fasthosts could have an outage of this nature… and in the e-mail they sent out was typically non committal in case any of their customers had the audacity to expect some form of compensation. Of course I know trying that one would be like trying to get blood out of a stone. I further know that the only way to guarantee uptime is to sign up with a more expensive host offering a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
But 4 Hours? Come on Fasthosts, its 2007 not 1999.
My day was saved because my strongest performing sites with the biggest PPC spend on them are with Clook, but all my profit margins were totally humped. Its not the end of the world, but I think I lost a good chunk of revenue yesterday (I’m thinking maybe 30% of turnover) and I’d be interested to know how much affiliate commission went down the pan over all the sites affected. So Fasthosts, on behalf of all the other affiliates I’d just like to say….
“Thanks for pissing all of our valuable traffic up against the wall!”
July 18th, 2007 at 5:15 am
Hi Kirsty,
That sucks! I strongly recommend rackspace, they’re a little more expensive, but you have guaranteed 100% uptime (they have redundancy build in). You also get 24/7 tech support. I used them for all my high income sites.
For a super affiliate like yourself, you can’t afford to have server downtime like that. That’s nuts!
July 18th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Yes indeed… I’ve been with them from the very start of my affiliate marketing career in 2003. Moving would be a bit nightmarish, but I fear you are right. particularly when I’m likely to often be in non-UK timezones where I might be asleep as my PPC spend gets sucked up for no good reason!
July 24th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Hi
I like you host many of my affiliate sites with Fasthosts, who to be fair on them are normally very good, however there have been a few problems of late, I had one with a clients site (non-affiliate) and they simply did not want to know.
I also tried calling the support line last night, all the support engineers had gone to deal with the flooding… I do hope that Fasthost themselves are not under threat from the floods.
As some of your other comments have said, the thought of moving everything away from Fasthost is a nightmare, however all my sites from now on will be on other servers.
Perhaps we should be looking at mirroring… probably overkill but depending on the sums of money involved it might be worth thinking about.
Matt Houldsworth
http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com