If you could have a really fast car with airbags, seatbelts, and antilock brakes, or the same car without all the safety features, which would you pick? When I picked Fastwebserver to host my site, I thought I was getting the first. Unfortunately, not all of the safety features worked as advertised, and I didn't figure that out until after the crash.

At first, I was very happy with Fastwebserver. (Note the clever use of the word was.) Performance for my website was excellent, the features were many and the price was great. Before long, I had built a fairly elaborate web site, and I started to establish a small but growing user base.

I was a little disappointed when I first realized that Fastwebserver didn't supply an outgoing mail server. I could receive mail to any address under my domain, but I couldn't send messages as anything@razorlist.com without maintaining a mail server of my own. They said it was for performance and security reasons. I just wrote this off as an oversight on my part to not realize this when I signed on with Fastwebserver. Oh well, it wasn't a big deal to me at that point.

I also wasn't thrilled when they moved me from one server to another without any warning. Most things worked, but one or two minor things broke. Again, not a big deal at this stage in the life of my site.

But then one day, bigger problems appeared... three days before a magazine article about my site was to hit newsstands.

I understand, problems happen. I think how you deal with problems when they do arise can be very telling.

It started out as a hardware failure during their daily backups. They restored the CGI and HTML files within a couple hours, but restoring the MySQL database took them a lot longer. MySQL is the heart and soul of my site. Literally every page relies on the database being available. It wasn't. My site was completely down for about a day.

Once the database was restored I found that I was missing a lot of records, so I contacted Fastwebserver Support again. And again. They eventually responded. They basically just kept re-restoring the database (because I kept bugging them), and they kept telling me it should only be missing about a day's worth of data. I told them I could confirm that two key tables had no data from the past three weeks. They basically told me "well, the date on the files is from yesterday, and all the other websites we restored didn't have any problems." Great for all those other sites, but that didn't fix my problem. It was like they didn't believe me, and that they had more important things to worry about.

Okay, for some reason, they couldn't restore the database correctly. It's time to try Plan B. Because I'm slightly paranoid about backups, I have a script that runs once an hour that dumps the entire database to a text file, just in case. I figured a fairly recent restore of that file should get me most, if not all, of the missing records. I asked them if they could restore that file for me. They told me that it should have been restored with everything else. Probably true, but my script had started running again when the server came back up, but since the database was still broken, my good backup file was overwritten with junk. I could have created a more robust backup system, but since they were already doing backups for me, this was just a failsafe. Or so I thought.

I explained all of this to them. They told me it would be a few days before they would have time to restore the file I needed. I said that was unacceptable, because my keys and indexes would get screwed up if any records were inserted in the meantime. They told me I would just have to fix any discrepancies by hand. They told me there was nothing else they could do at this point.

I waited a few days, and I called them again. They still wouldn't restore that one file I was looking for. I could not get a good explanation as to why they couldn't or wouldn't do it. Finally, they gave me a copy of the actual MySQL data files they had restored, that they kept telling me were up-to-date. I copied them to a Linux machine that I had available and created a new MySQL database. Luckily, MySQL data files are compatible from Linux-to-Linux (though not Linux-to-Unix). I was able to restore the tables I needed on the new database, and then export them and import them into my real database. I don't know what they were doing wrong, but I had finally found a workaround.

Despite their promises of daily backups and hourly system file backups, it was only through a lot of work on my part, a lot of headaches and a lot of luck that I was able to recover 99% of my data. The only thing they could tell me was (and I quote): "You are responsible for backing up your sensitive data." Great, so why didn't you warn me about this beforehand? And isn't that part of what I pay you for?

So, after a lot of shopping around and a lot of questions, I am now a happy customer of WestHost. It would appear that Fastwebserver isn't ready for prime time just yet.





Recommended: No

Monthly fees (US$): 9.95 (Basic 2 plan)
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: MySQL
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content