September 3, 2008 -- A UK judge has ordered Fasthosts (fasthosts.co.uk) to hand over almost £1,500 to a former client, for damages and fees for not honoring its uptime and customer service guarantees, according to reports from news site The Register (theregister.co.uk).
Consultancy firm UK Mobile Media (ukmobilemedia.com) filed a complaint with Southampton small claims court after its web site reported 22 percent downtime for a four month period. UK Mobile Media had been paying about £15,000 per year for its dedicated infrastructure used to offer clients services such as mobile email. It was reportedly awarded £1,212.68 damages and £220 in fees and loss of earnings.
The UK Mobile Media managing director Matthew Rahman claimed Fasthosts ignored support requests on more than one occasion.
Not appearing in court, Fasthosts submitted a statement to the court, "We feel that we have made reasonable efforts to ensure prompt resolution of the problems reported."
There have been other allegations of Fasthosts' arguably misleading service agreements surfacing on message boards.
According to comments posted late last year on popular hosting forum Web Hosting Talk (webhostingtalk.com), Adam Livingstone signed up for a dedicated server account under the condition that he would could cancel at any time, which the sales person he was reassured him was the case. When he wanted to cancel his account after six months, he was told that he must pay for the rest of the year even if he did not want the service.
Fasthosts was founded by Andrew Michael in 1999, before being sold to 1&1 Internet (1and1.com) for £61.5 million in 2006.
