ISP leaves disconnected users high and dry

UK web-hosting company Freezone Internet has left customers without their websites for over a month after a mistake in a server upgrade.

The firm has so far failed to offer customers compensation for lost uptime, despite the fact many of them have been using the service to run ecommerce sites.

One user, who uses the service to run a small ecommerce operation called shopoftheworld.com but did not want to be named, has had no website for over four weeks despite repeated calls to Freezone requesting the problem be addressed.

He is now attempting to bill the ISP for over £6,000 in lost revenue since the outage started: "It is absolutely unbelievable that a company should be able to leave a customer without the service for which he is paying for over a month, and seemingly not care to do anything about it."

The customers problems started on 5 July when a server migration, which was being carried out due to problems with servers running Windows NT4, resulted in the loss of root files.

Freezone admitted that some customers accounts hadn't been properly backed up for up to two weeks, resulting in lost data.

The owner of shopoftheworld.com has since been repeatedly promised full functionality would be restored to his site, but the problems remain unresolved.

Freezone runs a subscription-based business which charges users £19.95 per month for hosting websites with basic ecommerce functionality.

The company said the problem was limited to customers using the ecommerce engine on Windows NT servers and affected only around 70 of their 15,000 users commonly for about two weeks.

Ifti Hayden, co-founder and sales director for Freezone, said just three customers were still having trouble.

He added: "Our customers have a right to be upset about this, but we really have done everything we can to address the problems we found. We have learnt a lot from this tough experience, with some issues such as back-up being highlighted to us that should have been dealt with earlier."

However he refused to offer customers compensation for lost earnings though their sites.

He told silicon.com: "Maybe you could say that morally we should offer this compensation, but we have a policy in our terms and conditions, and this is something that as an ISP we just cannot afford to do."

Some affected customers will be offered free hosting and access to developers he said.