tsoHost pleads for 'patience and understanding' as sites borked, support sinkholed

Like 'thoughts and prayers' but for web hosting

Brit hosting outfit tsoHost has rendered some websites and bits of the company's all-important client area inaccessible since yesterday.

The company's status page begged patience and understanding for "some issues with our client are [sic] which is causing the back-end of your TSO account not to be accessible." At time of writing, issues continue.

tsoHost's social media orifice weighed in, describing work to fix the problem as "a priority." For some, however, tsoHost's idea of "priority" was not really good enough.

But this is not just the client area. It is all of our 80+ websites that we have with TSOHosts that are down. I have tried to contact you since 0800 this morning and apart from a brief Live Chat when I was told it would be sorted shortly, have had no response. This is not good.

— Broadbiz WebServices (@broadbiz) July 13, 2021

Users struggling with response times took matters into their hands, and reported some success in site resurrection by triggering a repair of their databases.

tsoHost is now part of the GoDaddy group, having been inhaled as part of Host Europe Group in a $1.8bn deal in 2017. Things have not gone well since. In 2019, customers of the company suffered a lengthy outage after some dodgy code was injected into its servers. Email problems have been a major theme, and last year tsoHost pulled the plug on the MrSite service it had acquired just two years previously.

tsoHost told The Register: "tsohost can confirm that some customers have reported issues when using http://my.tsohost.com/. We have applied a fix today which should alleviate any remaining problems for those affected. We advise customers who may still be experiencing issues to contact our support team who will be able to assist. tsohost would like to apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused."

A Register reader got in touch to regale us with their experiences, and complained: "I have lost hours of time trying to get them to sort out mail retrieval, installation of SSL, and website security

"Currently their own email is down – you cannot send email to support as it gets lost, and the access to customer accounts returns 'My.Tsohost will be available shortly. Please contact [e-mail] or call 0800 024 2931 for assistance.'"

Our reader waxed lyrical: "I was once a happy customer, for years their phone support has been a joy." Not so much now. "Hindsight is a brilliant thing," remarked our reader, sourly. ®