Yes, I write to you from the other side of the world, in a lovely sunny city by the ocean, having just done two awesome Minjin Jungle Swings, to write a rant about a web hosting company.

Nothing to do with the Big Adventure really, but seeing as the site I used to blog before travelling is the one that is hosted on Fasthosts I don’t have much of an option.

A Bit Of History
Another domain I’ve got (lionskull.co.uk) is used for my General Stuff ™ website for such things as Most Of My (and others-close-to-me’s) Email ™. I use Fasthosts to do the hosting – mostly out of laziness nowadays as I host other domains (such as Squage.com) with better companies.

At the end of March my one year web-and-email hosting period expired, so they tried to charge me for another year so as to keep it running – but the card details they had in their possession had expired.

So they emailed me. Probably. On an email address I’d forgotten about that forwards to a full account and probably just rejected. Oops. They may have phoned my UK number too. I didn’t check. Oops.

Luckily I noticed that they’d disabled the web component of lionskull.co.uk about 2 weeks ago and so I managed to log on to the Fasthosts Control Panel, enter my new card details and pay my year’s subscription to a) reactivate the web component and b) prevent the emails et al being suspended.

I got a reciept from them confirming that all payments had been made. Problem solved.

Or so I thought…

“You Still Owe Us Nothing!”
A day after paying, I checked lionskull.co.uk to find that its web components were still disabled. On going back to the control panel I was told that I still had payments outstanding. I went to the payment screen to be shown this:

Oh shit! I’d best pay that 0.00GBP straight away!

“Ok”, I figured, “this’ll resolve itself in a day or so” then forgot about it and got on with enjoying my travels. Yesterday night I found that this was STILL the case. This afternoon I received a text from home saying “Emails aren’t working – can you help?

Attempting to Get Customer Support
This morning I decided I needed to get this sorted out – there seemed to be no way to get my account activated via Fasthosts’ Control Panel – as every single option available to me just brought me back to the “Oi! You owe us money!” page (well, that’s a lie – if I was on the payment page and attempted to navigate using the page’s menus, it would just throw up errors as somehow it would try to access httpss://control.fasthosts.co.uk… genius).

I sent a detailed email describing my situation to the accounts department. I also mentioned that, whilst I could provide my account number, I could not provide my account “pin” as in order to get to this I needed to check my Fashosts Control Panel… which was locked out.

This afternoon I recieved the automated reply:

This is an automated reply and your query has not been seen by our Support Team.

Please re-send your request, including your account number and PIN in the first two lines of your email, remembering to include the “n” in your account number.

Brilliant. Fortunately the email suggested visiting a special page to have my details sent to me. I went there – and it worked! Sort of. The email I recieved pointed me to ANOTHER web page to grab my pin from.

Good news – from there I could email my account number and pin! Thing is… I did that 15 minutes ago and have received nothing.

In the mean time I’ve emailed Sales@. Then it’s onto POWER EMAILING.

Remind me in September to transfer everything away from Fasthosts, will you? Ta.

Pat

[UPDATE]
15 minutes later and they’ve now emailed the pin. I’ve emailed support again and this time I’ve been given a case number etc. Hopefully things should be on the mend now!

(Oh and I got a reply from the Sales Team. What was their advice? “Contact Customer Support, including your account number and Pin.” Awesome.