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11th hour major catastrophy

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 8:50 am
by Skittlewidth
I've just spent a month building a website and CMS for a client, with the development site running on a linux server, on the understanding that the finished site would run on a linux server.

The client gave the go ahead for it to go live 30 minutes ago, and only then did it emerge that we cannot transfer the client's account with Fasthosts from a windows server to a linux server because thats only available on a reseller account. Fasthost's windows version of PHP does not seem to come with gd in anyshape or form, rendering the custom image processing upload scripts the client paid for utterly useless.

So I tell my boss to close the account, and reopen it as a linux account. Well I'm not allowed to do that because the client spent £200 setting up mailboxes on the current account yesterday. And Fasthosts has not got a great record for being flexible when we call them...

To say I'm peeved is putting it mildly. :evil:

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 9:16 am
by feyd
remote the image processing until you can get it transfered?

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 9:23 am
by Skittlewidth
Yeah thats what I had in mind. We'd pretty much need to run the entire CMS off of another server, because of FCKeditor and MCPUK, and my other image processing scripts.

Unfortunately this particular client is quite paranoid, (hence having his own hosting account rather than going through our reseller account) and he won't be happy that the PDFs and images he's generating won't reside on his own server for now. We're about to call Fasthosts and see if we can sort it out. Fingers crossed!!!

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 9:26 am
by feyd
Just explain the situation to him that Fasthosts is, well, idiots in how they designed their systems.. especially in how they can't do a simple transfer to another server.

I'm going to move to the Enterprise, as this could be an educational experience in dealing with client types.

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 9:45 am
by Skittlewidth
Tell me about it. I'm desperate to move away from Fasthosts, who, in my opinion are just a load of bandits. I don't care if their the UK's number 1 hosting company. That's only because the average joe who wants to build a simple website themselves cottons on to that claim and pays whatever because they seem to be a professional outfit.

We all know all Fasthosts need to do is practically flick a switch and the problem is solved, but no, we have to close the account, write to the accounts department to be refunded for the mailboxes set up yesterday and then set up a new account, reconfigure the mailboxes, and wait for the domain to be transferred.

Worse than that, for all the time we would be faffing about with that, the client's company's email would be down, which is totally unacceptable to the client (quite rightly).
Fasthosts line is "This is all we offer, take it or leave it." If I was regarded as more than a web monkey at work I would ditch Fasthosts in a second.

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 9:49 am
by feyd
do you have access to mod_rewrite (or equivalent) on it? If so, you could set up redirection/proxy to a different server entirely while you wait for the domain transfer. Not sure how their interface to mail would work, but you should be able to auto-forward everything to a new domain easily too.

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2006 10:10 am
by Skittlewidth
I'm not sure about that. It had crossed my mind. I think at some point mail would be affected, but we are negotiating with the client as I write, to allow mail to go down for about an hour on Friday late afternoon when traffic is likely to be low. (Thankfully they don't have international clients!).

I'll look into it. I'm a bit vague as to what differences there are between PHP on IIS and Apache (which is what I'm used to) with regards to things like mod_rewrite, ini_set() etc.

All I know offhand is that Fasthosts do not allow anything in an .htaccess file beyond password protecting a directory - but thats Apache only right?