Future Hosting VPS: Initial Impressions And Review
Dec 22, 2008
After considering and comparing VPS offers from Future Hosting, Knownhost, Wiredtree, and Liquidweb, I went ahead and ordered from Future Hosting.
I'll post my initial impressions, and try to update the thread over time.
I currently have a VPS at Godaddy, plus shared hosting at Godaddy, 1and1, and Namecheap.
My objectives were to get away from Godaddy VPS, set up with a 'better' provider, and consolidate sites.
I am fairly technically adept, though not an expert. My requirements are for hosting appx. 25 sites currently, with perhaps another 15-25 to be added over the next 12 months.
Most are low volume, a few are low-to-mid volume. Nothing fancy, primarily informational sites and affiliate sales sites (WP and Xsitepro), and some direct ecommerce.
I focused on the 4 providers mentioned above based on recommendations and reviews here and elsewhere. My main concerns are reliability and price.
After comparing plans and the specials listed on the 'Webhosting Offers' board, I settled on Future Hostings "Titanium" managed VPS offer. The special offer they listed was for 50% off lifetime cost.
Through live chat, I spoke with Nick to ask some specific questions. He was patient and helpful each of the 3-4 times I came back with questions.
One question I asked was how long it would take to get provisioned. He quoted me at under 12 hours - this was also mentioned on the "Offers" thread, specifically for the current special.
The "unspecial" price was $84.95 for 1Gb RAM, 650Gb bandwidth, and 50Gb disk space, with cPanel. I added Fantastico for $3.95. After the coupon code, I'll be paying $46.42 / month.
I put in the order at 10:04am.
Registration was activated at 10:50am.
Cpanel, Virtuozzo, firewall, etc. installed
I've been with XenVZ for about a day now, and thought I would share my initial impressions thus far.
I was looking for a cheap, basic little VPS to run a few simple services off of. I had raked high and low through these forums since I was looking for something located in the UK, with Xen virtualization for <£10/month.
I came across XenVZ in the advertising forum, and thought I would check them out. Started up the Live Chat, and got through to Sean right away. I asked a series of questions and received prompt and professional replies.
I thought I would start out cheap, so I signed up for the £3.99 'taster' VPS (they have a 30 day money back guarantee, so can't really lose). Signed up around 8:10, received invoice 8:12, paid invoice right away and had the server details at 8:21. Whole signup process took around 11 minutes.
Even for a tiny VPS with only 64MB RAM, it performs fairly well. I am running a Ventrilo server inside Screen, IRSSI session inside Screen and Lighttpd server (serving a simple static placeholder page), and I still have around 20MB spare RAM.
The network seems pretty solid too, I thought I would test it out with a wget from a UK mirror service, the connection capped out at about 9.5MB/s.
If your looking for a UK VPS, I highly suggest giving these guys a check, can't fault them so far.
Of course, I'll be back in a month to give a more detailed rundown of the service.
I don't run a domain off the VPS but can provide the IP on request.
I had three VMs with Fsck VPS, dating back to before they got hacked in June. I've been paying the bill since then, I imagined as a kind of insurance, so that I had the VMs handy if I needed to use them in a big hurry. Last week, I tried to log in, and found that my three VMs didn't exist, anymore. As far as I can tell, the VMs haven't existed since the June break-in.
SETUP / PROVISIONING
My first reaction was "They've been billing me for three months, and providing nothing?!??!" I'll be honest, I was pretty tweaked, but after I'd calmed down I decided to see how they handled the situation. So I submitted a ticket asking for an explanation: How long had the machines been down for, and what would it take to get them back up and running?
It took about a day, but we eventually established that VAServ could build three new OpenVZ VMs, and that they would give me three months' credit for those three machines. Since I actually do need the VMs, and I didn't really want to fight about the billing, I decided to go for it. It took another day, but I did get three new machines up and running.
Unfortunately, I do have some complaints about the process, specifically:
- VAServ's technical support is very inconsistent, and different techs seem to have vastly different levels of communications skill and professionality.
- Many of the techs don't seem to bother reading your ticket, beyond the subject. They tend to only be capable of answering the first question in each ticket/email, and they ignore anything else you've asked.
- After the FSCKVPS/VAServ buyout, following the break-in, the HyperVM control panel was disabled. If you need a reboot, or a root password reset, or anything that you can't accomplish yourself by SSHing into the VM, you have to open a ticket. (Seems like a chancy proposition, now, to me.)
REBOOT-AND-PRAY
Today, I started seeing memory allocation errors in running programs. The machine mostly worked, but certain operations (shell scripts, in particular) would error out. I opened a ticket asking for some guidance, and within less than 10 minutes, the VM started rebooting. I got an update about the ticket a few minutes later, and was told that the VM had been reconfigured (increased memory allocation limit) and rebooted.
I was pretty mad about the no-notice reboot. I'd been in the middle of editing a bunch of configuration files, and I lost an hour of work. It just seems so unprofessional and inconsiderate for VAServ's technician to bounce the VM without confirming it with me, first.
I did get an explanation/apology from the tech who rebooted the machine. I asked him to have his supervisor contact me, which took a few hours, but I did hear back. The supervisor wrote:
"...we reboot the vps if we found any VPS out of memory. Normally most of the service stop working or access got killed when VPS is out of memory..."
To me, it sounds like the reboot is a standard procedure for a common problem. Given that kind of environment, it's only natural that the tech's first impulse would be to reboot, given a ticket about memory errors.
At the same time, it's also indicative of a bottom-of-the-barrel service, isn't it?
- Memory problems seem to be common--is that because they're over-subscribed? Does your 512MB allocation mean anything, or is it just talk?
- The staff can't / won't bother to read through a ticket and give it some consideration.
- The staff has an itchy reboot finger. Their first impulse is to power-cycle, rather than to try to understand and fix the issue directly.
FOR THE FUTURE
I do intend to continue using VAServ / FSCKVPS, at least for now. They're really cheap, about $10/month for a 512MB VM, and I can mostly get done with what I need to do. But this is a qualified opinion. I am solely using these VMs for simple R&D projects: Quasi-professional work, stuff that nobody is currently paying me to do.
Given my experiences so far, I would never trust these guys with a real, money-making business project. VAServ / FSCKVPS is suitable for toying around with, or if you're flat broke, but I wouldn't bet my job on them if I could possibly help it.
I'm setting a calendar reminder for myself, right now, to check back in another month or so with an update to this post. Assuming I'm still chugging along with these VMs, I'm going to make a point of posting my impressions on a regular basis.
site took a bit longer to get than stated, no big deal, but then no cpanel. After that, system dumps(appeared to be from tailwatchd) == 4 or more per hour, then support added a script to delete them every few minutes. then no Email-- no Exim, courier--NADA. Sent in a ticket, got exim working, no courier so went to Dovecot(worked). Was unmanaged! Never switched anything to it, so didnt lose anything.
*I know there is another thread about Future Hosting but since I am starting my own review, I am not sure if it is best to gatecrash into that review or start my own. I guess it is better to start a fresh one so I don't break any rules. *
Just a little background, I had been renting Dedicated Servers for the last 6 odd years and last year since there were some changes in my business framework, I decided to move the few sites I have to a Reseller's account and a few shared hosting accounts to cater for my needs. That was back in October 2006.
Things were doing quite well but the server in which my reseller's account was hosted was a little shaky with several downtimes, heavy-loads and thus causes the sites to be relatively slow the last few weeks. It was intermittent so I thought I ride out the annual contract (I should not have signed up for a year but that is another story altogether).
However, being who I am, I like to pre-plan 6 months ahead of time. I missed the time when I was using dedicated servers as I like the control it gives me. The Reseller's and Shared Accounts seems rather restrictive in the controls but I guess you get what you paid for. Basically, having to rely quite extensively on the tech support. The Tech Support at the Reseller's account was quite responsive but the hardware did not really give them much justice.
In any case, I thought of bringing forward the migration period because of late the downtime was hurting my business and my clients. I needed very much to think of my customers for without them, I would not be anything today.
The plan was to go with a dedicated server as I did not quite have a good experience with a VPS in the past. I had tried Servint years ago but things were a lot slower than a shared account, I guess it was probably because it was equipped with 128mb RAM and that was when they first started their VPS Services. That experience did not go well with me.
However, reading about the Future Hosting review and looking at what they have to offer, I thought I give them a try, besides there is a 30 days money back guarantee so what do I have to lose.
I saw their offer in the For Sale section and dedicated to ask a few questions and Vik responses were quite professional and quick and I decided to sign up, well almost immediately. He approved the sale and everything was set in motion.
In about 3 hours, I have my sparkling VPS with 512mb which I started working on. It was indeed quite fast, which exceeded my expectations. In fact, from the get-go, these people know what they are doing. I like the fact that they have a Business Continuance Protection as an option which protects me from the bandwidth from DDoS. DDoS is a situation in which I never want to be in but this $2.95/mth gives me a peace of mind.
I like also the fact that they provided a managed service which I sure did make use of it. Although I know something about managing a server and did some of the lock-down, I am pleased that there is a team willing to help me when I landed in some trouble (a few times actually). I had them handle some of the security setup which I did not get to do on my own.
There was the time when I had a SSL certificate set up for one of my site but the https access did not work. I could not figure out what to do and contacted them and they helped me resolved the issue without question. It worked for a while until I messed things up again and they got it resolved again and told me what was the issue when I asked them what they have done. Although, support is not there at the snap of the finger, they have been quite responsive and were helpful.
I love the control the HSPComplete and Virtuozzo Control Panel provided in managing my VPS account. I finally feel that I have arrived.
Like I said at the offset, these guys thought about everything. I love the fact that they provided the free VPS Snapshot which allowed me to create an image backup of my entire VPS which I can restore with a touch of a button. This feature would probably cost me a lot more on a dedicated server and it is free here.
The other thing is that the account came with 3 IP addresses and I found that all came from different C Class which is very neat. Most places will just give you running IPs which may be an issue for some.
I got an additional IP through their HSPComplete interface and it was assigned to me almost instantly.
I have to say that although I have not been there more than 4 days, those were very pleasant 4 days. In fact, I love them so much that I have abandoned the idea of getting a dedicated server. Not only do I save on the money, I got a great service and support.
What more can I say. No regrets here.
*Mod, if you need evidence, the two sites on my signature are hosted on my Future Hosting VPS account. *
I signed up with Future Hosting in October 2007. I was looking for a VPS to transfer all my domains to. I chose Future Hosting among others I was considering. Back then, Future Hosting had an offer, so I ended up paying 10$ for the first month and I said I am not going to loose anything let me try for one month and then I can decide if I will stay or not.
So I chose the package I wanted and proceeded with the signup. A while later, I get my VPS setup and all is running. I then added more features to my VPS. The first problem I faced, was a problem with PLESK, so I opened a support ticket and after exchanging few replies, the problem turned out to be from the domain. We used domain.com instead of x.domain.com so that was fixed pretty fast. Pricing: 10/10
The first month I paid 10$, and they always got deals going on. Everyone says you get what you pay for, with Future Hosting you get more. Other companies might charge you for backup, but they came up with future protect which backup all customers data every two hours. In addition they have server doctor which takes care of automated tasks without the need of an administrator. Speed: 10/10
I find Future Hosting very fast as opposed to other servers and I am very happy with that speed. I know it may differ from your location, but I am in Lebanon and I am very satisfied with the speed. Uptime: 10/10
In 18 months I never had a single downtime. Even when they moved me from the old to new datacenter, I didn't notice any downtime. 100% uptime in 18 months. Support: 9.8/10
I wanted to give them 10/10 but there were few issues with very few support tickets. Overall support was great, now they added server down option, so this will be dealt with directly I assume, but I don't think someone will use this feature much. When you open a support ticket, once it is read, they notify you and tell you they are checking it and will get back to you soon. Sometimes the issue requires a senior admin to check it so they will forward it to the right person and also notify you of that. In those 18 months I never had any ticket unsolved.
I faced very few problems arising after requesting support on some issues. One of them happened twice and which were taken care of fast. After one of my tickets was solved, any website on my VPS I browse I get served the php file, which means, I am asked to save the file, the server doesn't compile the php file which was a bit scary. The second happened today, none of the domains could access webmail but this was solved fast also.
I am still waiting for a reply concerning the problem that caused this.
One thing worth mentioning and I am very happy of, is the help you get from Future Hosting support. A while back I asked to upgrade my php version to PHP5 and mySQL to mySQL5. After a while I get a reply that PHP version is updated to version 5.x.x but they couldn't update to mySQL5 because it was attached to plesk but when plesk released a new version supporting mySQL5 I reopened a ticket asking to be updated to mySQL5 and it's done. Since I am working on my own PHP Framework, I needed some modules installed on the VPS so I can use them. So I open a ticket and requested if imagemagick and ffmpeg could be installed on my VPS, an hour or two later I get a reply these were added. Now you know how happy I am with them. Other hosts might charge for all that.
One other thing. I faced some troubles with my CC for few months. So once I get that my CC was declined, I asked them to expend my billing grace period so I can fix it and they gladly did it. I don't know how many hosts would do that. Overall: 9.95/10
I am very happy with Future Hosting and hoping to increase the number of servers with them once I release two of my applications. Two things I would recommend. First, introducing windows VPS. The second phone support.
If you are hesitating whether you go with Future Hosting or not, don't think about it, just go there read the TOS and then sign up.
Even though this is a 2 year review of Future Hosting, I would like to back up a little bit more. Lets go all the way back to April of 2006 when I opened my first site.
Between April 2006 and March of 2007 I tried about 5 different hosting companies. I changed companies because I did not believe that 15 people on my forum at one time was "High Usage". And that was the story that I was told over and over by those "other" hosting companies. That with 15 people on my forum at one time, I had reached the limit of my hosting plan.
In March of 2007 I had enough. After changing host around 5 times, and getting the same line of bull from each one, I decided to give running a website one more try.
After reading the reviews here on WHT, I decided to go with Future Hosting. When my forum was setup and people started visiting, something strange happened. My forum could support more then 15 people at a time. To be honest, I was amazed. Here was Future Hosting, and my forum with 20, 30 and even 50 people on it at a time. This makes me wonder what was worng with those other hosting plans I had payed for.
As my forum grew, so did my server needs. Over the past 2 years I went from the most basic VPS plan that Future Hosting had, all the way to the most expensive.
Instead of 15 people at a time, now my forum has 350 - 400 people at a time, gets around 2.9 million page views a month, has over 589,000 post, 48,421 threads and 14,719 members. Over the past 2 years Future Hosting has provided my forum with the resources and tech support that it needed to grow.
Today was a big step for my forum and my relationship with Future Hosting, because I just leased my first dedicated server from them.
To sum up my 2 year review of Future Hosting:
I am a very happy customer.
I highly recommend Future Hosting to anyone looking for a Virtual Private Server (VPS) solution.
Maybe in another 2 years I will be back here posting a review of their dedicated server.
I thought I should share my feelings on FutureHosting even though we have only been on their server for 48 hours.
Background --------- I started having my sites hosted back in 1990's and have had about a dozen hosts since then. (Started with Pair.net when they were like maybe 2 of the 3 hosts on the planet, LOL) 90% of the time, I have needed to find a host due to my former host being acquired or some other non-technical reason. So you could say that I tend to stick with a host for as long as possible. I have moved from shared hosting, to reseller hosting, to dedicated hosting, and now to VPS hosting. I started my VPS adventures with PowerVPS.
This was about 3 years ago if I recall. Like most here, I did a great deal of homework, read and lurked. PowerVPS was in my top 5 final list. I selected PowerVPS and was extremely happy to put the headaches of dedicated servers behind me. For two years the VPS was very stable. That changed about one year ago. I was told I was hitting resource max and asked to upgrade. Oddly, my sites' traffic was about 1/2 of what it was in the first two years. ie my VPS should have less resources needed. PowerVPS moved many of its legacy VPS users to new hardware. I don't recall they informed me, though they said they did. They did inform me that they would make a decision on the remaining legacy users in terms of billing promotions -- they never did. Downtime continued. I began to notice that their newer techs did not share the same ability of communication and skills as past/founding techs. Answers were curt and became more and more unhelpful. We have all seen this pattern before where a host starts out so well (2 or 3 guys/gals), and as it grows, they add remote staff that just don't have the same passion of the founders, or language skills. (Disclaimer: English isn't my native, so no excuse for lack of communications in business IMHO).
Thus, I began my search for a new VPS here. FutureHosting was in my top 5 along with KnownHost, SolarVPS, Jaguar. Actually, I rated them 3 or 4 in my final list. I tested all of these hosts' sales responses and went through the shopping process just before clicking 'sign-me up'. (I work in Ecommerce so I like to see that process). SolarVPS answered my questions the best. KnownHost a close second. I am sure there are a few other good VPS companies like ServInt, Lunar and HostNexus, but their prices just don't reflect the marketplace IMHO.
Due to my needs and budget though, I selected FutureHosting as they seem to offer the best balance -- competitiveness and support.
FutureHosting - 48 hours ------------------- As my data was on PowerVPS with Plesk, selecting another provider with Plesk was important. Actually, I have always been a Plesk fan having used all the CPs (I just wish they would stop trying to offer 1,000 products and spin off a CP-only company like they were.)
FutureHosting (FH) started the migration on Saturday night. Sunday morning I notice that all sites hadn't been moved. I checked my inbox and read the many emails awaiting me. It seemed Plesk was having a hard time using its server migration tool (typical of Plesk that they introduce a feature that doesn't work 100% of the time.) FH informed me they would migrate my VPS (domains, etc) manually.
While this was going on, another tech worked on some requests I had related to SSH, root access, etc.
What I found in the last 48 hours was what I had hoped for... Techs that received my tickets, and replies that stated WHAT they were doing. I felt informed during the entire process. In some cases, CLEAR explanations were given. In some cases, SIMPLE answers were given -- where I couldn't grasp the why. The level of service was what I experienced in my first year with PowerVPS. And now, a really important point -- EVERY tech that worked on my tickets displayed the same level of competence. All too often, I have felt in the past that the level and ability of techs ranged so much. This became more apparent as of late on PowerVPS (are they contracting out support? No idea.) It was a real pleasure to deal with each tech. I think I counted 5 different names! What I REALLY appreciate was that it was obvious that each tech taking over a ticket READ the entire ticket thread. Too often when a tech takes over due to moving it a tier or shift change, I felt like I needed to explain everything from the start. Gah!! I don't have time or patience for that.
Hardware wise, I moved from (PowerVPS) AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 246 to Intel(R) Xeon(R)CPU E5420 @ 2.50GHz (Future Hosting). In the case of PowerVPS, my VPS was on an old legacy machine that a few of us unlucky ones were still on (We were asked to bump up $$ to go to the new machines, I refused.) I don't know which server is better, but thus far my sites feel much more snappy. I also notice that my former VPS used burst RAM approach vs. SLM. (See my other post http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=896249). I should also state that perhaps PowerVPS uses this in their new machines. No idea.
Overall, I am paying the same amount for my new VPS, the sites are loading much faster and most importantly, the service has been top rate. I was a little worried at first because I heard such great reviews of Knownhost and SolarVPS (I am sure they are warranted), but based on the past 48-hours, I must say my selection was right for me in many ways. I'm crossing my fingers that this level of service will continue 3, 5 or more years down the road. If they do, I won't hesitate to recommend FutureHosting to the MANY developers I come into contact with. (I have sent a great deal of leads/business to every host I have been at.) I will need to revisit this thread on my anniversary to see if things continue in such a great manner.
Some of the other hosting companies I have tried are:
1&1 Virpus Godaddy
And another one I stayed with for 2 weeks and can not remember the name of it. I have tried other hosting companies before. So I do have something to compare Future Hosting to.
Before I signed up with future hosting I had a website running joomla with a bridged SMF forum and another site running MDPro and MDForum. MDPro is a cousin to Postnuke and MDForum is kinda like PHPBB. When I signed up with a hosting company, most of the time I got a VPS and 256 megs of memory - or what ever the company had in that range. For some reason the pages took 10 - 20 seconds to load on the joomla site. The MDPro site was a little faster, but not much. Even though I submitted several trouble tickets, it seemed that tech support could not figure out why the response times were so slow. The usual answer was my site was "high traffic" and that was why the pages were loading slow. I often wondered how 10 - 15 people on a webpage can be high traffic? I tried the joomla support forums, the smf support forums - I looked for help everywhere I could.
After getting no help from one hosting company, I signed up at another, and another, and another. I had almost given up on ever owning a website.
That is when I came to Webhosting talk and started doing some serious research and that is when I found Future Hosting.
When I first signed up with Future Hosting in March of 2007 I got their 256 mg VPS server to run my new VBulletin forum on. It was a new hosting company, a new forum and a new adventure.
After the first month I must say that I was impressed. I had just left the last hosting company because of server performance, so I was surprised when people actually started signing up on my forum and posting stuff. I was even more surprised when the server allowed more then 15 or 20 people on it at a time. And I was REALLY surprised when the pages loads in just a couple of seconds, instead of 10 - 20+ seconds.
A few months later it was time to upgrade to a new server. And then a couple of months later my site was moved to a new data center.
The last time I needed serious tech support was in November of 2007 - exactly a year ago. During that year the only little bumps that have happened were asking the tech support people to update MYSQL, or update PHP for me. A whole freaking year with no server problems. You just do not hear about stuff like that. But somehow the techs at Future Hosting keep these servers up and running 365/24/7.
In the last week of October 2008 my site started experiencing slow load times and connection issues. So I opened a support ticket. Tech support and I exchanged several messages back and forth over the following days. But this time things were a little "different" - the connection problems would come and go. By the time I opened a ticket, and tech support looked at the site, everything was normal. There were a couple of times the tech support person saw high memory usage, or high CPU usage, but it lasted for only a couple of minutes.
Finally, one of the support guys checked the apache server at the right time and found my site was under a small DDOS attack. The Apache server had around 1,000 active connections to it.
After the tech support people installed some security software, the sever is back to normal and everything is running great.
Currently I have the the Elite package with 768MB of memory and 40 gigs of hardrive space. On this server I run 8 websites.
One of my forums gets over 1.8 million page views a month, has over 332,000 post, gets 900 - 1,000 members visiting every 24 hours, 700 - 1,400 post every day and around 2,884 members visiting every 30 days.
My VBulletin forum - [url] My wifes VBulletin forum - [url] My wifes site opened a couple of months ago. Anyone interested in digital cameras - go sign up. Even with all of these sites and traffic, I still have around 500 megs of free memory and use just a fraction of the CPU.
It seems that most of the time when you read a review its negative. This is just the opposite, I am very satisfied with Future Hosting and highly recommend them to anyone looking for a serious hosting solution to real world needs.
Before I found Future Hosting I had almost given up on finding a good host. In fact, I was considering getting out of the website business all together. It seemed that no matter what host I tried, I would get the same results. Whether it was slow page loads, or terrible support - every company I tried seemed to be just alike. Until I read a review about Future Hosting here on webhosting talk.
Here I am 20 months after signing up with Future Hosting. And I am telling you, if your sick and tired of your host - dont live in misery, dont live with slow page loads, dont deal with poor tech support. Contact Future Hosting and get your website up and running like it should be.
I will be posting a month review after my 1st months of service. But for now, here is my initial review of Wiredtree.com
This is under my domain of aps-enterprises.co.uk which you can tell is on the Wiredtree network. OK here goes.
Placed my order on Saturday 21st as Level3hostings main site went off line and I got a really bad feeling that my VPS would go down too, a feeling which proved all too true.
After a little while, I got the Fraud check phonecall. Although I couldnt hear them, James Webb could hear me, that was quite amusing....
Sunday 22nd, got my VPS Setup. Usually they said it would take a lot quicker to get setup, but they did have a network maintainence for about 3hrs. I was stil happy.
7.16am GMT time, my VPS with LEVEL3HOSTING went down *thank god for backups!! hooray I learnt my lesson*
The VPS I ordered is a good spec and any support tickets I had to raise, all were answered and resolved in an average of 15mins!! Yep! 15mins. I used to pay an external company each month, and they resolved stuff in 24hrs. How cool are they?
So anyway, VPS is great, Uptime has been 100% one can only expect. And Support is by far, one of the best I have seen.
Only been in business with them for my 5th day, so far they will be keeping me as a customer and if I have to upgrade (which I know one day I will), then I will be ordering any upgrades through them.
This is only my initial review and I will post a 1 month one too.
Which I reckon will be a positive one, just like this one is.
Thank you Wiredtree for making my life easier for my hosting business. As they say you do get what you paid for, and believe me the services I have had from some people that saying is very true, however you guys.... I think your prices are cheap for the amount of work you actually do.
Keep it up, and I hope this review makes a few customers for you.
I signed up with FutureHosting for a managed Linux VPS. I'm about a week into going "live" with the nameservers switched over and am very happy! I was going to wait a month before posting but these guys have been so patient and thorough with the tickets I've submitted I wanted to give my initial thoughts
Overall 9.5/10 Great Host. Very patient and thorough support. Very Good response time. Surprisingly low pricing. I highly recommend for your VPS. Very Good response time on Support BUT no phone support
Signup 9/10 Signup was straightforward. I think they have a higher volume than normal with their promotion. It took a bit of time to set up the VPS (under 10-12 hours) but I'll take a few hours' delay if I'm getting a good product/support for months/years.
Speed 10/10 They publish their speedtests here [url]I just downloaded a couple test files (5-20MB each) from my VPS and I get to about 1.1 MB/sec. At that point it may be a limit from my ISP (FYI speedtest.net gives my download 14000 kbps = 1.7MB/s). No issues on speed! : Support : Overall: 9/10 Speed: 9/10 Thoroughness: 10/10 'Other': 8/10 Very good response. For NORMAL PRIORITY issues, within 5-30 minutes I get a response that someone's attending to it and soon thereafter I have a resolution. Some tickets have taken longer but they haven't been critical issues so it's really okay. You can prioritize your tickets as CRITICAL or SERVER DOWN and I'm sure they're even faster.
They have gone back and forth with me and been patient with my questions (I've never administered a VPS before) and I GREATLY appreciate that. I've had many tickets with them and other hosts may have just said "this is really not an issue with the VPS" and left me to learn it myself-- FutureHosting has been very helpful.
Sometimes (probably due to my own vagueness/lack of knowledge), my actual request/issue is unclear. I think this is where phone support would be very helpful; it's not currently offered. (and this is why Other gets an 8/10)
Reliability 10/10 I've had no downtime so far! My nameservers/DNS switch took longer than expected but that has nothing to do with FH.
Pricing 10/10 With their DoubleRAM/Bandwidth+30% off OR 50% deals, Pricing is great I think. Others had recommended WiredTree to me given their lightning quick response times. I'm sure they're amazing but they were also almost double the price. FutureHosting has had very good support at a great value IMHO
I'm not sure how you 'validate' my domain/review but just let me know and I'll PM you the information on my domain.
This is an initial review of WebNX.com. I was hosting my personal sites on a reseller account at Eleven2 which had started feeling kinda slow, so I was in the hunt for a low cost dedicated or a mid range VPS.
After scouring a lot of places for quotes, I finally came across WebNX's thread on WHT on the 17th of March.
The specs looked to be amazing, and their Value level VPS would fit right into my budget, and match my requirements. I fired an email to sales, and went on to their site to see live support online.
I spoke to their rep on live chat, and I was given a signup link in minutes (it was 11PM PST), and I was told that my VPS would be setup in a few hours.
And as expected, I had the root logins for the server, and HyperVM within 4 hours.
I logged into SSH, and ran cat /proc/cpuinfo and I was really amazed to see that the server really had 16 cores
I then moved my cpanel backups from my old host, and the speeds were really good.
Even though the server is unmanaged, their support rep helped me to move a file that was around 5GB in size, that was constantly failing during cPanel's remote SCP backup feature. They went to the extent of downloading the file for me and uploading it so that I could restore it.
It has only been 4 days, but I am extremely overjoyed with the level of service I've received so far. Infact, I feel like I'm cheating them by paying them so less ($15 for the first month, and $59.99/mo after that)
I've been through many many hosts and server providers in the past few years, and this is the only second review I've ever written on WHT. (The previous one was more than a year ago).
I've been with the host (dmehosting.com) for just 1 month now but I decided to give an initial review as I am pretty impressed with their support.
All the websites went offline and the HTTPD would not start even after manual reboot, but they provided extended support and did a complete rebuild of PHP configuration file.
Initially, when I saw their prices frankly I was not expecting or relying on great service (usually the case for low price) but I was quite surprised that they balanced it pretty well.
I would recommend them for anyone looking for very cheap servers with good support.
Got a great deal on a simple server for a side project. Paying $59.99 a month for the server which makes it very affordable for medium-size projects. General:
* Setup Fee: Free * Celeron 1.7 GHz CPU * 512 MB RAM (upgradeable to 2GB) * 60 GB IDE Hard Drive * 500 GB Monthly Transfer * 5 IP addresses* * Premium Set-Up Options
The sign-up was quick and easy and I was sent an authorization email. I authorized and was able to immediately log into my account.
I processed the order a bit late at night so the next morning I received a call on my cell from my personal tech rep saying the server was already up and running (they said it would take three day, more like 8 hours)
He offered any assistance to help me get up and running and gave me a direct line to his phone in case of anything. Then he emailed his contact info and an introduction to my e-mail as I requested.
So far I am very pleased with the setup and the individualized attention, although I may not require it, it is very comforting to know it is there.
First impressions mean a lot to me and Aplus.net's first impression is stellar to say the least.
Hope this helps, I will be posting a review a bit down the line on how it progresses.
I another thread recently I done a 5 year review for another provider hover circumstance changed and I took on a couple of Gigenet servers ( relatively high end)
Sales were extremely efficient working with me to achieve what I needed at a price I was comfortable with, replies were fast and concise so I ended up with 2 new machines and backup service.
Normally I don't need a lot of support and for the first few weeks nothing bar rDNS set ups - However I ran into some serious post migration issues over the past few days that had me stumped, support has been some of the best I have ever received both in speed and efficiency -
Anyway I sincerely hope I will be coming back to this thread in 5 years time to update it.
Although the domain was registered in 4/15/08, I could find next to nothing on WHT or the ‘net in general in the way of reviews on FiveBean. Saw a lot of specials and things they have been running off and on at different venues and boards, but couldn’t find a review to save my life. I did search pretty thoroughly. No web cache on web.archive.org either.
So, I’ll be the first to post one (that I know of), with a special they are offering, it’s very affordable, if the service turns out to be good enough, then I have another node at a great price J. The more, the merrier. Win / Win 4 all. (FiveBean also offers shared hosting, so not exclusively a VPS provider.)
Hardware nodes – From their site: “VPS Nodes are built with Intel Core2 Quad Processors, Premium SATA Disks and RAID Protection powered by CentOS 5.x and MoxieVM. Each VPS server is backed up daily and we provide 2 full backups to our customers.”
Although I never rely on provider’s backups, it’s good to see them offered as standard. Could come in handy.
They offer 5 plans; I ordered the middle-of-the road “Starter”. All VPSs appear to be OpenVZ based.
Ordered Plan - 512M / 1G burst 40G HDD 450G BW 1 IP CentOS 5 for initial load
Initial order, small issue - Placed order at about midnight, got my welcome email at 7:40 AM. One issue was, I did not receive any emails from their ordering system, other than the PayPal-originating receipt. The emails were listed under the Client Area, so I still had access to read. Since I own and admin my own mail servers, I checked logs - Emails from ordering system were sent from a non-FQDN domain. From SMTP logfile: RECEIVED: MAIL FROM:<fivebean@kona> SIZE=3560 Mail server rejected because of the incomplete domain. This appeared to be an issue with the sign-up process only. All support ticket replies came from a FQDN. I described this problem in a support ticket, curios to see if they really do look @ and fix. Maybe on my second order? Everything initially ordered during the process was delivered, with no follow-ups required to correct anything. That's a little rare, from my experiences.
They offer online chat support, but have not caught it online as of yet, although I haven’t checked before 9PM on any given day, so not a fair eval on that aspect. FWIW.
- On to the goodies -
Control panel - Apparently, FiveBean previously used HyperVM, but has since disabled and rolled out their own self-spun VM manager, "moxieVM". It's a simple, yet effective, web interface that allows me to do everything I need to, and everything works. That's always a good plus! moxieVM control panel contains the following: VPS list facility / user profile control / pass reset VPS Controls -- Reboot / Start / Stop / Rebuild OS / Set Reverse DNS Report (simple) shows -- OS currently installed / Monthly BW Usage total / Current Memory Usage / Action Log of previous control commands
Noteworthy - when you select "reboot / start / stop" there is no confirmation, action is queued and executed immediately. Good info to know.
Rebuilds - FiveBean offers 13 OS rebuild option w/ 6 Flavors - Ubuntu / Suse / Slackware / Fedora / Debian / CentOS, 32/64bit in most. Reload of OS (From CentOS 5 to Fedora 10) took about 4 minutes. Note - keep your original root login password! On OS reload, the pass is reset to the original you receive in your VPS welcome email, NOT whatever you have currently changed it to. I can see this being an issue if it’s been a while since you have reloaded and end up digging out the old email. A little different than HyperVM.
Network - Ping times are consistently 15-16ms from/to Austin, 21ms from/to Atlanta, 12-18ms from/to Kansas City, MO. Traceroute to node (69.162.118.226) puts them behind Limestone Networks in Dallas, Tx. One thing I can report, their network seems to be very peppy. I've had a hard time hitting anything from / to the VPS with more than 20ms. I haven't seen a 30ms yet. From anywhere. An I have VPSs from coast to coast.
VPS / Initial Order- Hostname was set properly right off the bat, both initially and on OS reloads. Reverse DNS PTR self-set worked without having to put in a ticket, a first for sure! I just entered the rDNS PTR I required, waited about an hour, and it was set and propagated, ready to go. No muss, no fuss. Although I haven't put any load on the system, the CLI is responding very fast, and pings / traces / nslookups are very quick (as stated above). The only issue at all so far was the aforementioned order response email non-FQDN flurb. But, stuff happens. Small beans (pun intended).
AUP No porn, excessive violence, hate, deception, illegal IRC that causes no disturbances is allowed. I really prefer non-IRC networks, but they have a long lecture about it in the AUP, so it appears they watch activity pretty close.
Nuts n Bolts -
Benchmark (benchmark is on newly loaded system, minimal install FC 10, no load) ------------------ INDEX VALUES TEST BASELINE RESULT INDEX
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Conclusions – so far, so good. I’m actually pretty impressed with everything I’ve seen up to this point. I’m planning on putting the server under load as a backend node of a busy website’s load balancer. I’ll post follow ups as we go along.
Does the hosting industry have a future because IMO the internet is getting faster who knows what the speed will be in 20+ years time, what I am trying to say is surley people will start to host their own sites from their own home.
Anyone here using Future Hosting's VPS? How long have you been on it, how is support? Are they stable on uptimes and connections? Does the managed vps mean they will install software for you such as ffmpeg and etc? I am needing a good vps solution for my phpfox website,
I'm not having a good experience with Future Hosting. Since January, I've had one disk failure and two power outages. Future Hosting usually gets good reviews, right? But I'm thinking of moving my site to Slicehost. Is this a good move?
I ordered a VPS and within 10 minutes it was setup and I was ready to go. Since then we've had at least 20 communication through tickets/email and they're been great!
Although I wish they had phone and chat support, ticket support works fine. The prices are very reasonable, and I love that they have so many options(control panels, resource amounts, etc.)
I'll reply with a week review, but I have no doubt that it'll be better and better.
How many people are on future hosting servers and can anyone comment on the performance Last time I had one my loads where very high, access to plesk and ssh was very slow They have a new offer on, 35% off double ram etc.. seems to good to be true
Id just like to mention that I really appreciate the hosting service you (Future Hosting) provide to me and the work and support that you have assisted me with - I am very gracious and I look forward to future help from you.
I thought I should also mention that you are the host I have even been with the longest and you have left the most satisfaction out of the all the hosts I have gone through,
Being able to have a VPS service provided to me and served in a UK datacentre is extremely important to myself and my clients - that is what is so great about Future Hosting, they give you a large choice of selection of datacentre's to choose from when signing up with them!
I recently went out on a limb and signed up for dedicated hosting with IndiaNets, a company that I'd never heard of in all of my years as a web developer. I found IndiaNets in my search for a host that offers multiple, non-sequential Class-C IP addresses. (I need this for SEO reasons.)
Normally, I like to either call or chat online with a host before I sign up to see how responsive they are and how they treat people. Prior to signing up, I had a couple of live chats with Vijay, and he was great -- quick to respond and very knowledgeable. I also asked for an account feature that was not specified on their web site, and he went out of his way to accommodate me. After the second chat, I signed up.
Since all of my 20 accounts had to be set up manually, I expected this to take a few days, but Vijay set them all up within 24 hours, and this was on a weekend! He was also online and available to chat over the same weekend, which was good because I had a few tech support questions.
So far, so good. Then came an email after a couple of days saying that there was an issue with one of the servers, and the hard drive would need to be replaced. While it's always an inconvenience when these things happen, they happen nonetheless. It's the nature of the business. What really matters is how the web host deals with the problem. I must say, I'm impressed with how IndiaNets handled this issue. They sent an email to all customers explaining the problem and how it would be solved, as well as the time frame during which it would be solved so that people would know not to make any updates to their sites during this time. They also set up a web page with frequent updates about the status of the issue.
In addition, I submitted a non-related support ticket while all of this was going on, and I still got a fast reply (within minutes, actually). Even though I had to wait until the server issue was resolved for someone to address my other issue, I appreciate that I still received a reply with an explanation of what was going on and that it would be handled as soon as possible. This is much better than submitting a ticket and having to wait for days to get a response. I appreciate some kind of communication, even if it's to say something like, "I got your message, and I'll help you as soon as I can." This type of customer service is extremely rare, especially in the hosting industry, and I just want to say thank you to Vijay and IndiaNets for being so refreshing.
vBulletin's performance is a hell of a lot better compared to my last host (fasthosts.co.uk - which takes 60 seconds to give an error page!)
In addition, litespeed is pretty damn sweet.
Setup took maybe 10-25 minutes from payment.
Only problem I have with it is that SSH is a bit too locked down - wget/etc don't work, and sort of negate the need for me to use SSH in the first place.. (to get and unzip files without having to upload massive things)
I recently switched my dedicated server hosting from The Planet ($100/mo) to iWeb ($70/mo). I'd been with The Planet for quite a long time (originally Rackshack, then renamed to ev1, then bought by The Planet), and had been reasonably happy with them, but I'd been thinking about jumping ship for a while, for several reasons: (1) I was unhappy with EV1 for paying protection money to SCO; (2) my hardware was getting out of date; and (3) I thought I'd see if I could save some money on my monthly bill. I found iWeb because they were high up in the netcraft rankings, and netcraft showed them as running Linux. Searching the webhostingtalk forums for comments, I did find one long thread that involved one very unhappy user, but I wasn't convinced that his complaint was completely reasonable, so that didn't scare me off.
The dedicated server page at iWeb has a prominent offer of 1-hour activation on selected servers, but that wasn't an option I could use, because I wanted to use their cheapest configuration, which is a 2.4 GHz celeron, with 1 Gb ram, 160 Gb disk space, and 1500 Gb/mo. Since this was a step down from $100/mo at my old host to $70/mo at iweb, I was worried about quality of service and support, so I only signed a one-month contract. If you prepay for 24 months, you can get the same service at $52/mo. There was a setup charge of $49. Access to a web control panel would have cost extra, and they tried hard to sell me on that, but I didn't need it, since I'm comfortable managing everything via SSH. I got Debian installed on my machine rather than their default for Unix boxes, which is CentOS.
The first problem I ran into was that I made a mistake at one stage of the sign-up process, and although the interface did have buttons for backing up to earlier steps in the process, they didn't work for me. Starting over from scratch didn't work, and I finally had to put in a different email address in order to get a fresh start.
I placed my order by phone Wednesday morning, and got access to my server Thursday afternoon. Everything worked well as far as getting apache, mysql, and postfix set up.
IWeb is Canadian. Their pricing for US customers is in US dollars. They answer the phones in French, but everyone I spoke to was bilingual, and we never had any significant problems communicating. My credit card company's risk management thingie got triggered because of the non-US transaction, but that wasn't a big problem.
The big problem I had was that I was unable to log in to the iweb web site, which I needed to do in order to set their nameservers to point my domains to my box's ip. I put in the username and password, but the login page just refreshed. I started attempting to resolve the problem first thing on Friday, and ended up dealing with a total of six people before finding a solution at noon on Monday. In the interim, they offered to set the dns zones for me from their end, and that worked. Support was pretty bad. Sometimes I was able to get through to a technician on the phone in 5-10 minutes, but other times I spent ~1 hour on hold waiting to talk to someone. Email support generally received either no reply or a non-helpful reply. This was one of those typical, frustrating tech support situations where you keep on explaining the same things to different people, they promise to get back to you but don't, they send you canned email replies that don't address your actual question, etc. The long and the short of it seems to be that their login page had at least one known OS/browser incompatibility (with some versions of Windows+IE7), and one other, which was the one I had run into (with both Firefox 3+Linux and Konqueror+Linux). (I had javascript and cookies enabled on my Linux box, and in fact the cookies were being accepted, but the page just wasn't loading.) Tech #3 was unable to log in to my account on his own machine using my login info on Firefox+Win. The final resolution of the problem was that tech #6 suggested I try a different machine, and I found that it worked on my wife's machine with Firefox+MacOS. Go figger.
So in summary, their support is horrible, but basically I'm resigned to the fact that all webhosts' support is horrible. Maybe iWeb's is a little more horrible than The Planet's, but they also cost significantly less. The experience has been bad, but not bad enough to make me give up on the initial investment of the setup fee plus first month's service. I realize that at $70/mo they're working on a very thin profit margin, and I'm not under the illusion that they can afford to provide the level of support that would come with a $300/mo account. I'm going to stick with them for at least a while and just try really hard to avoid ever needing support.
They have been very helpful in getting my site back up and running. I had a few issues like unable to get the back up of my sql to restore so I uploaded the back up and they restored that for me. Nice guys.
An interesting issue came up which required me to have a symbolic link well could have gone with out it but would have made it so one of my sites was down for a few more days.
Basically the symbolic link allows 2 sites I run to have the same games with out taking up any more space on the server. Actually this was hostsimplex's idea and they created the link. How ever I could not restore that link or figure out how it was made to after opening a ticket with hostpc I got one made.
But not right away cuz I was first told it would not work, which had me kind of puzzled so I told them hostsimplex had that file so I know it works just I am not sure how they did it. Any way they did get a symblolic linke, 2 in fact one I could not delete and another one. I had them delete the one I did not need and got the other one working.
I will say they are very good people and very helpful. They even put up with my frustrating of things not going right which was not thier fault.
A few days ago I got our new dedicated server with Sweden Dedicated and at first everything looked fine. The server was provisioned with some delay but still it works as expected and the network is fine.
Their support though is quite a different story and far from the advertised 24/7 and response time under 3 hours. A simple reverse DNS record request is still open after almost 24 hours. And what is worse is that today I found the the IP address we were assigned is from a blacklisted spam network. Their phone number is playing a voicemail message and nobody seems to be looking and the tickets I opened, so I'm seriously considering alternative providers.
