Hosting 365, Ireland's self proclaimed largest hosting data center is having more trouble with its operations. After a couple of amazing issues last year with power, this time, it is their backup system that is down since Saturday 30 March. Their "engineers" seem to have some problems to cope with it. Since our servers are located in the Hosting 365 datacenter, it has a bit of impact.

They are meant to communicate to their clients through the hosting365status website, but this has no mention of this outage. We might be the only client using their backup system. So you need to check on a regular basis their website, which is not up to date.

The most amazing thing is that their internal communication or common sense is not the best. Here one example why :

- We noticed on Sunday that the backups had not been working properly Saturday night. We emailed support on Sunday (support@hosting365.com) to be told first of all that the support email is now noc@hosting365.com . At least, the engineer forwarded to the proper support email. FYI, the email signature in the noc@ response email still show support@hosting365.com.

- An engineer told us to re-install the backup software (that had been working for over 2 years !).

- We followed his instructions, although to be quite frank, since the server had been running for 2 years in that configuration, it did not make sense.

- Since we had no response yesterday, we called on Tuesday morning as it still was not working. The engineer we spoke to, knew exactly the Ahsay backup system was down. I checked the Hosting365 status website and they did not know it was down either (which is I assume where some of their technicians check for answers).

I hesitated before publishing this, but I am so frustrated that I decided to do so.

I sent an email of frustration to the MD on Tuesday. I also highlighted some recent issues that he does not seem to be aware of. Bad luck, it was the 1st of April, so he probably did not believe all the things I told him about their operations. He has not replied to me yet (they say they have over 75,000 clients so we probably are too small). Someone from H365 called at a bad time on Tuesday evening and was meant to call the next day but he forgot.

Conclusion: Do a bit of home work, talk to your clients (I am not the only frustrated one) and take a look at your operations. You need a serious technical audit.

We're putting some specs for a new data center.

Note: It came back on Sunday, one week later. Still no reply from them regarding the various issues. Very poor customer communication.