RapidSwitch: UK webhosts in champagne throwing cat fight

Need another reason to avoid RapidSwitch? How about their spamming the customers of another hosting company for no other reason than, they could?

Updated Get your popcorn. It's time for the UK webhost cat fight to end all UK webhost cat fights.

Earlier this week, according to the forum dwellers at WebHosting Talk, the UK hosting outfit PoundHost sent a routine marketing email to a group of its customers - and forgot to hide their addresses in the BCC field. At which point, one of outfit's biggest competitors - RapidSwitch - snagged the addresses and sent each exposed PoundHostee a note urging them to jump ship:

Dear Poundhost Customer,

Switch your dedicated hosting to RapidSwitch, and we'll give 6 months hosting free, migration assistance, and a 100% service level agreement. As if this isn't enough, we'll even send you a bottle of champagne* to celebrate! Whether you have one server or a cluster of 100s, you can benefit from moving to RapidSwitch.

And the footnote looks like this:

* Don't worry if champagne's not your thing, we will send you a non-alcoholic hamper instead

Then, just days later, at about 11pm UK time on Thursday evening, RapidSwitch took its Maidenhead data center offline to repair a network failure - and many customers were left without service for the better part of a day. And counting. "We've got ten servers over there," one Reg reader told us very late Friday evening. "All [have] been up and [down] more than a pair of whores knickers [today]."

Read more
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/25/webhost_catfight/