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(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Budget web hosting provider Fasthosts (www.fasthosts.co.uk) will soon replace its UK customer service team with offshore call centers in Romania and the Phillipines, according to a report by The Register.
According to a Fasthosts statement issued to The Register, up to 38 employees are scheduled to be laid off at Fasthosts' Gloucester, UK headquarters.
The staff handled support for Fasthosts' direct customers, while its reseller hosting customers will continue to be served from the UK.
The web host called the job losses "regrettable," but stressed that offshoring its customer service operation "will further improve customer experience" and position the company "to better serve its hundreds of thousands of customers".
Fasthosts said the offshoring will align the web host with other companies owned by its parent company, 1&1 Internet.
There are also ongoing rumours inside Fasthosts that the web host's servers will also be moved offshore, according to The Register's sources.
The company has not confirmed these rumours, starting instead that it "continues to operate at its state of the art facilities in Gloucester, and does not envisage moving any other operational functions overseas."
Fasthosts has a less than flattering reputation for its customer service after encountering a few technical issues.
Last April, the company suffered a major outage, leaving many of its dedicated servers offline for at least up to eight hours.
Before that, in November 2007 it changed the passwords of its customers without any warning after its servers were hacked, preventing many people from being able to access their sites for several days.
Fasthosts has entered a statutory consultation period of several weeks with the 38 employees whose jobs are being cut.
The company says it will try "to secure redeployment within the group wherever possible."
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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