As I'm finally slamming the door and leaving FastComet behind me, I'd like to warn others to find another host. I just looked back at my support tickets with them since 2018, and it's atrocious. In that time, FastComet has ma
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Mer
naged to corrupt and destroy months worth of our data multiple times and by multiple means. If they weren't just rebooting our server half a dozen times a month, (crashing our nodeJS application in the middle of write-to-disk operations) then they were letting the shared server's disk drives fill up while our paid account still showed 15gb's "free." (also crashing write-to-disk operations)
FastComet: They'll sell you the disk space whether they've got it or not.
Worse though is that in attempting to resolve these issues, support staff entered our account, looked through our application's code, and instantiated multiple instances of our script -- without our request or authorization. In other words, FastComet's support had no concern for the privacy / security of our intellectual property as it exists in our code, not to mention that of the data we collect. FastComet support breached our account that day because whoever was working the desk - with a spectacular act of ego - just assumed that these continuous, repeating crashes and errors we'd been reporting must be a problem in the code /we'd/ written. Rather than a problem in their fly-by-night server management -- selling disk space they don't have, with server up-time claims they can't actually produce.
And when they started trying to "fix" our script, (instead of their borked server configurations) they apparently didn't notice or care that there was already an instantiation of our script running. So we ended up with multiple scripts running in parallel, (which the script was not written to accommodate) each triggering on the same conditions in a cascade, competing with each other for read/write access over the same files, putting our data at risk yet again. Which all happened while we were LIVE with the endpoint that our nodeJS application serves. All this... as a support response, days after their disk space issue corrupted months of our data.
Now, that was some time ago. (2018) And I would've left FastComet then and there had they not given us a year of free hosting to apologize. (Ultimately, the application and data being collected is supportive / non-critical.) And while I can say things have improved since then (one should hope so!), I'm still sitting here closing out our account. At least once a month I still end up having to reboot the script, their billing department is a nuisance, phoning me at the end of every month to remind me to send payment. (because I refuse to authorize them with recurring billing) And this month, when the script went offline and I went to restart it, I found that I couldn't 'term' into the server over SSH anymore, for some reason. Haven't been able to for two weeks.
And I'm just sick of trying to figure out what's gone wrong /this time/ with FastComet. So I'm sitting here waiting for my entire directory structure to download via FTP, so I don't have to deal with them anymore... Which I have to do by FTP, because FastComet's near-useless backup systems don't allow you to just download one of the zipped backups. You can only restore them in place. Brilliant.
So yeah: If you're looking for a host... There's a ton of 'em out there. FastComet is one you can cross off the list immediately, and keep looking.
Mindre
