FastMail apologizes, Hawk Wings still gushy

FastMail.FM, my preferred personal e-mail provider, has announced major upgrades to improve reliability and minimize down time.

Speaking of down time, I was without e-mail service for much of the weekend. This was quite a shock since I’ve come to depend on FastMail. I used to recommend it unconditionally. It now must work a while to restore my full faith in its dependability (and its apologies for the outage are only a start).

To its credit, though, I have no plans to switch — but a few more multi-day outages might cause me to rethink that.

(The Hawk Wings folks, who also use FastMail, remain gushy about the service. Maybe the outage didn’t affect them.)

Here’s FastMail head honcho Jeremy Howard’s own summary of the outage and subsequent recovery (sent to me by e-mail):

The server which went down was the last non-replicated server we had. Unfortunately we had to delay to migration of users on this server to the new replicated environment, because we were waiting on new hardware from IBM, which was 2 months overdue.

We received the required hardware a couple of days before the server failure, and had already started moving users to it. After the server failed, we restored backups for these users onto the new replicated servers.

We are now in a position that *all* FastMail.FM users are on replicated servers. Therefore, any file-system corruption problems in the future will not cause a lengthy outage (it would cause an outage of 30-60 minutes if it happened again, since that is how long it takes to switch to the replica).

Update: When the hefty likes of Leo Laporte and Glenn Fleishman (see comment) begin to speak ill of FastMail, the provider definitely has a problem given that it caters to e-mail power users.

I’m sticking with FastMail for now, as I said (partly because I haven’t come up with a sufficiently powerful alternative yet), but my confidence in the provider is badly shaken.