We rely very much on our web site presence for potential clients to access our business, for existing clients to access their images and also this blog.

A few days ago there was apparently a ‘denial of service’ attack on the server hosting our site. In order to stop the server from failing under the pressure, Heart Internet blocked several ranges of IP addresses. What this meant is that many of potential visitors were unable to access our site or any other site hosted on that server. This should have prompted a concerted effort by Heart Internet to identify the specific IP address(es) involved and unblock everyone else but they are clearly in no hurry to do so. To make matters worse, they repeatedly avoided answering a very simple question: “what other solutions are there?” This major issue wasn’t even mentioned on their status page. Incompetent, uncommitted and misleading. We are still receiving reports from individuals who are unable to access the site.

I apologise if you have seen any error messages trying to access our site – I realise that it gives a very bad impression. We will be actively exploring options to moving our site to a more reliable company.

Hopefully a useful warning to other businesses thinking of using Heart Internet. Best avoided.