The main problem is that to get any help, you have to have log-in to your account. To log-in to your account, you need your account details. If you have forgotten your account details, you need to contact support. See where this is going? All in all getting help from anyone at Fasthosts is a frustrating job.

Interestingly enough, many users have called into question the strength of the SLA – that so proudly is displayed as 100%. Rapidswitch will refund a user half a day’s fees for every hour of downtime experienced. To get a free month, Rapidswitch would need to be down for an unprecedented (for them) 60 hours – so they could be down for a whole day yet you would get half your monthly fee refunded, which is a pretty shocking SLA.

In an open letter Roz Ho, VP of Premium Mobile Experiences at Microsoft, apologises for the “recent problems”. She then claims that “most, if not all” of the data has been recovered and will be restored to the servers over the next couple of days.

Since the beginning of October, Sidekick users have had problems retrieving their data, leading up to the complete failure of the cloud-based service. Customers were advised to switch their Sidekicks off to prevent synchronisation attempts.

A VDS provides the full flexibility of a dedicated server – you are free to install your own software and configure the system to your exact needs as there are no other users – at just a fraction of the cost. They are perfect for development environments, simple applications, and sites which need the security of a dedicated server but don’t need the additional power.

You are provided with the root login/administrator access to the virtual dedicated server, in the same was as if it were a physical server. You can choose your operating system, (e.g. Linux CentOS, Windows Server 2003) and can install and configure your own software exactly to your own specifications. If you require a custom Apache configuration to host your website, you can do this.

Sometimes it is recommended that a user purchase a virtual dedicated server instead of a reseller package. With a Windows or Linux reseller hosting account, you are effectively free to resell a number of websites, based upon the amount of space/bandwidth you have purchased wholesale from your reseller hosting provider. This is especially suitable for a novice web hosting user, who need to host a number of websites but who doesn’t have the systems administration experience required to keep a virtual dedicated server running smoothly and securely. Additionally, a web designer who wishes to offer web hosting to their clients may benefit from a reseller hosting account – they want to offer website hosting to their clients but without the added problems of worrying about administering the server, making sure all of the scripts and server software is up to date etc.

So whilst a reseller account is very convenient, and cost effective for a user wishing to host a large number of websites, it doesn’t quite offer the flexibility of a virtual dedicated server, which may be more suited to a developer running multiple websites requiring custom Apache/MySQL/PHP/Ruby on Rails hosting requirements. In conclusion, for most users a reseller hosting account is usually the better option to take, whilst as a user gains more experience and understands the details of administering a linux hosting server, a VDS may be an option to progress to later on.