Fasthosts to pay damages for 22% downtime

A customer of web hosting provider Fasthosts has been awarded almost £1,500 in damages after the firm failed to meet its uptime and customer service guarantees.

UK Mobile Media took Fasthosts to the small claims court on Monday 1st Sept after suffering 22% downtime over four months. They had been paying £15,000 per year for the solution which incorporated mobile email for their clients.

The worst problems occurred were reported to have occurred between October 2007 and January 2008, when a repeated hard disk failure caused periods of up to 72 hours offline for some of UK Mobile Media's clients.

Matthew Rahman, MD of UK Mobile Media, told the judge that support requests had repeatedly been ignored. He encouraged other businesses hit by poor reliability and support to consider action against Fasthosts.

Rahman said: "It was something you would ordinarily expect to take 15 minutes to replace... we lost significant custom through it."

"We made a big mistake and we've learned a big lesson. I certainly would never recommend anyone relying on them (Fasthosts) for anything important to their business."

Fasthosts did not appear in court to defend itself, but submitted a document that said: "We feel that we have made reasonable efforts to ensure prompt resolution of the problems reported."

UK Mobile Media were awarded £1,212.68 damages and £220 in fees and loss of earnings. Fasthosts has until 15 September to pay. UK Mobile Media has switched to another hosting provider.

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