Futurehosting did a migration this morning on my VPS and after the migration my site is reverted back to old backup in February. Both on my old VPS and new VPS Ips shows the same old backup files not the current one. I panicked and quickly told the support and they did the restoration to the recent backup file from my old VPS but I checked my site again and its still show the same old files. I have lost total of 3 months of hard work and there's no way for me for getting the files back. From their VPS plan "All VPSs include Future Protect which makes a backup every 6 hours." I did not get the recent backup instead of last February backup. This is outrageous and there's no sleep for me on tonight while I'm going to create all those missing files.
I have a very long 2-week 2-page horror story but I don't feel like typing it all out right now.
Basically, they deleted my account with no warning and now I need to transfer my domains away but I cannot because my domains are locked and I have no access to my account so I cant unlock them myself and they wont unlock them, no matter how many times I ask them. Does anyone here know a number I can call at 1&1 for somebody who knows what they're talking about and can actually help me? Or perhaps an email address? A web page?
Does web hosting company The Planet have absolutely no respect or care for small business customers?
I have just had the most horrible customer service experience in my life. Our server went down after a simple restart Friday. Now, three days later, we are still without a server, our web sites are down, and we are loosing thousands of dollars. AND - even worse - we are loosing credibility with our customers.
After technical support had been unable to get our server up and running again Friday, we asked the tech staff if it would be a good idea to buy a new server instead, since our old server was getting old. They said this would be a very good idea.
So we talked to one of The Planet's sales staff on Saturday, and he promised we would have our server by the end of bussiness that day. Now, two days later, we still don't have our server.
And, worst off all, every time we contact The Planet support, we are promised things are getting solved and that they will get back to us, which never happens. We even left a message with one of the managers, and even he didn't bother to answer us back!
Can you imagine being out of business for THREE whole days (going on four), with nobody caring about your bussiness enough to even keep you updated on what's happening? Have we just been extremely unlucky or are there others out there with similar experiences?
I started with Servage.net on recommendation of a friend. At first they were good. Simple to use, had most of the features I wanted.
It was slow, especially the database, but I could live with that for the low price. Then the horror began...
First, a hack attack that put trojan scripts into every index file in every site.
Servage refused to acknowledge this after I told them they were hacked. They refused to back up their system to an unhacked version. Instead they let the trojans continue on as if nothing happened.
If that isnt bad enough... they then changed the password on my account.
To which I tried to use the forgotten password feature to recover it. Only, that would not send the password to my email address.
Now, in order to contact Servage, you have to log in and submit a ticket. But I couldnt do that without my password. They rejected every email I sent based on this reasoning.
I finally got an email account that did not autoreject my email address.
So they sent me a new password.
Which did not work.
So I asked again.
They send the same bloody broken password back.
I asked again, for a new password.
No response.
Ask again, no response.
Ask again, no response.
Ask again, no response...
After months of this they decided I was not worth talking to anymore.
Oh... that was until my service expired. Then all of a sudden I was back in demand.
Daily emails saying my account is overdue. As if I was still using it. As if I was still ABLE to use it.
Eventually two of my domains that I purchased thru Servage are going to expire, and I have no way of getting them back, since they refuse to allow me to log in. They refuse to talk to me.
Many friends and business partners have given up on me, because of the problems with Servage. I had a dream contract to develop my Naiture project, ruined. All my emails with my potential client, blocked. @#$@#!$!#@$#!@$
Let me conclude this message by saying "Servage Sucks" so that all the search bots in the world can find it and lead people here.
I have 2 servers hosted with SoftLayer, In 22 Jun, I had reboot my servers, one of them didn't start and then SL said that it's was a reslov problem and we fix it, after that day, I start seeing all my websites traffic start go down , I check Google Analytics and the visitors number is going down everyday, I open a ticket and say that to SL and i think it's was a DNS problem they tell me after a lot of replys that they fix it and i must wait for 72 hours that need for the dns to be updated worldwide, I didn't say that SL support is bad no they are very very helpful support and many thanks to them, but i wanna to listen to your opinions here about my problem, and from where it's?
I have been with Future Hosting since April of this year. I originally signed up during a promotion they had here on WebHosting Talk (for their Platinum Unmanaged Cpanel VPS).
My VPS was setup within a couple hours. Their support team was very helpful throughout the entire setup process.
For the months that followed, I had no major problems and everything was running great.
I would rarely experience an outage (in fact the only outages I experienced were due to network upgrades - and upgrades are a good thing). Future Hosting offered to do a free security setup on my VPS (which I thought was excellent - I didn't have to ask them, they asked me).
In the last month, I started to experience some slow downs on the VPS. Sometimes the slow downs were due to high load issues, the SATA hard drives, or a latency issue. I was setup on one of their Dallas servers when this was happening. Future Hosting offered to move my VPS to the Chicago datacenter. I read some posts on here that their Chicago servers are a lot better, so I accepted the offer to move the server. Jim from Future Hosting did the transfer and I was able to transfer all my web sites to the new server with ease. The speed difference moving from Dallas to Chicago was pretty dramatic. They also changed to SA-SCSI drives, and that makes a huge improvement (I believe Chicago and Dallas have the new drives).
In the end, the service at Future Hosting has been excellent. Support is great as well and their technicans are very helpful (especially Jim - great job). I recommend Future Hosting for anyone who wants a VPS. With the amazing prices they offer, and their excellent service, you can't lose.
Why has Ipower turned into a such a poor hosting service? I have been with them for years and now they are leaving me little choice, but to find a new provider. For years they were able to provide me with a smooth service. Over the last year I have experienced tons of down time, long wait time for customer service, and recently downed email service for way toooo long.
Each migration in the last years I'm running into this bug that Postfix wants to run on port 587 even though this is turned OFF in the Plesk Panel.
Sometimes it does this after some update.
Because another process is running on port 587 this means that postfix does not start and I have some downtime until I "repair" this.
"Repairing" means going into Plesk panel and turning ON SMTP-Auth.... Wait a moment for it to apply and then turning it OFF again....
This unwanted behaviour can be easily reproduced by having this option turned off in the Plesk panel and then running /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/mchk --without-spam
This will end up in a non-running postfix if another process is already running on port 587.
This shouldn't be happening. Especially because I reported this behaviour years ago..
I finally bit the bullet and signed up for a VPS after my many years of dedicated hosting I signed up on Friday, and since I have had nothing but problems. Not sure if cPanel caused some trouble with apache, but apache wouldn't start, I think there were compile errors, as a httpd directory wasn't created and for some strange reason I had a httpd.old directory instead. I noticed something was wrong when i couldn't add accounts to cpanel..
After a recompiling httpd (apache) this was fixed. Then for some reason I couldn't upgrade the php version, it was on 4.6 and I need 5.x.. Its now Sunday. .php files are offered as downloads (not being passed through apache). I've asked many times to have the VPS rebuilt, as it seems to be one problem after another, but support seem to ignore my request and instead attempt to patch a fix.
I usually don't write these type of reviews, but I just needed to vent.
Hopefully this isn't a sign of things to come, hopefully they blow away my VPS and reinstall a new one from scratch. and hopefully no one else is going through this..
My Dedicated server runs out on the 30th, so I now have 10 days to fully set up my VPS. I hope that Futurehosting, pulls their finger out and just reinstalls the VPS , as there seems to be one challenge after another.
I had problem with my VPS on the last couple of days. Futurehosting staff said my site has caused high CPU and migrated my sites to other node and my files are about 30 gigs and it took 24 hours to move. After the move I noticed it's still the same ip, so I switch on my VPS and disabled and remove my image generating script and disabled image hotlink on my VPS to see if the CPU continue to rise. It still goes high up to 100%. I tried to restart the VPS and it still goes to 100% very quickly. Can anyone here show me how to check what exact thing is causing the high CPU load on SSH command? And what command is used to check the specifications on what my VPS has? eg memory, kernel, etc.
I was searching for a good vps and i found this website. there offers was pretty good and i checked for a live chat and didn't get it. and then i wrote email and i got reply within 5 minutes. i asked for the time which they are taking to set up the vps. he said they will set up it within 3,4 hours. and then i purchased the server and i got all the access except WHM/cPanel within 5 minutes from the purchase. they installed WHM/cPanel 11 after half an hour and everything is fine. the server is up and running. and then when i tried to add a domain there was a error and i wrote a mail to their support. and then the same, they replied me within no time and their support is excellent. I Hope they will keep this support. i am a adiungo customer and they are only comes up once in a blue moon. even there websites( adiungo.com ) are down. i hope this will be a better place for me. if anyone have any comments, experiences or ratings about this team, let me know.
So I've been on a hostgator reseller account for a few years, and for the most part they were pretty good. Just recently they did a cpanel upgrade which hosed IMAP because I think they switched to dovecot, and IMAP SSL was mere impossible, always freezing my outlook client etc. That and finally wanting to have more control over the server I started my search for a VPS.
Of course, LOTS of reviews with different viewpoints on the different VPS offerings there are. What better place then to come here to see them. Finally it came down to wiredtree and futurehosting. I finally pulled the trigger on futurehosting.
First glance, I was confused because I wasn't sure when my account was going to be created. I received a welcome email and when I tried to logon to cpanel, it wouldn't bring up a page. In the support chat they said to wait a few hours. After waiting a few hours I tried again but had cpanel errors, because the install was still in progress. See I'm the eager type, hahah so im sure if it was someone else they would have had the patience to wait.
Finally the server was up and running, me new to VPS started opening tickets with questions and "how to best case scenario" help. Just shy of 10 tickets [I would say under 10 minutes before a response was received], because I kept one question per ticket for easy tracking, and I was on my way to getting sites transferred using CPANELS built in transfer tool, which works flawless.
I have to hand it to futurehost, yes there were a few hiccups in the beginning, but it was WELL worth the move. Knock on wood.. I went from a 90ms response time on my old host to 7ms (Chicago DC woot)!
Support, I cannot hand it to ARUN (and the other staff) any better. He did a fantastic job resolving issues and response time was unbelievable.
I would recommend futurehost for those looking for a VPS. I'm still stunned by the quick responses in the support, so I know that when/if I do/did have/had problems it would be resolved instantly.
I purchased a VPS from Futurehosting at their Chicago datacentre back in October. They were running a special offering a 40% lifetime discount, with additional ram and bandwidth.
The additional features are nice but probably overkill for my needs. Who really uses all the bandwidth they say they need!
Server was the Platinum cPanel, that comes managed for $35 or there abouts. They colocate their servers in the Steadfast facility, which alone is a nice bonus. I already have servers with PowerVPS but I`ve been looking for a Chicago server for a while and the knockdown price tempted me over.
I wanted something in Chicago owing to my location in eastern Canada. I get supeb latency as do my clients.
Anyway, server was paid for immediatly and it wasn`t more than a few hours later one evening when I received my welcome emails along with the other things. Everything was up and running, however there was a slight glitch with the cPanel installation which Jim looked into.
The fact they offer a managed service, colocate in Steadfast, advertise quality hardware, offer proactive monitoring (one service free), daily backups and a bunch of other stuff is sweet.
Three months later I am still with them, I would score them as follows:
Support: 8/10, I would really love to give them 10/10 because the team are always responsive but there two things that bug me. The canned responses, when I would prefer an answer as to what happened not the "this has been fixed now". The support desk is frustrating as hell, especially when email piping is not used. You have to login through HSPC then login to the support desk with a different password. Just seems like a series of annoying hurdles which is as I said, frustrating when you`re in a hurry! That said, the techs are responsive and usually reply with five or ten minutes. I can`t recall a long wait for a ticket to be resolved.
Sales/Billing: 10/10, Nothing to complain about here. They do as they say, work within their advertised hours competently. Vik and Jim who generally man this desk are great guys to work with. Vik the owner is very flexible and seems like a standup guy. Example I had a billing issue where I asked if he could wait a few days before I paid the invoice - this wasn`t a problem for him. I`ve even had sales tickets answered after hours, admittedly they take a little longer to reply but still!
Network/Hardware/Uptime: 10/10, the service has been fantastic at the Steadfast facility. I get pings of 46ms average and my clients always comments on the speed of service. I cannot recall any downtime and I monitor it every ten minutes, so far 100% uptime since October.
Overall: 9/10, should have been ten but my two moans about the support desk and canned response, but hey that might be me being overly fussy.
I can highly recommend these guys. A few days ago I ordered another server. Vik won me over when he mentioned the new 32gig nodes being installed at the Equinix facility in Ashburn, yes that`s Equinix. Yes I can appreciate the node is new and lightly loaded so far, but man the VE runs at warp speed. Perhaps in a few months once he has loaded this node more I`ll come back and update on this new VE I purchased.
Mods, I can submit a domain for verification if you like
I have seen numerous comparisons between KnownHost & FutureHosting, WiredTree & KnownHost, etc etc, but never seen a comparison between WiredTree & FutureHosting.
FutureHosting ordering system is so confusing, and their separate charges for sevices monitoring, response time guarantee levels and hardware firewall charges are pushing me away from them. If you are their customer, please tell what options did you select while signup and how is everything going.
I need to decide between the two, what do you people recommend? FutureHosting or WiredTree?
(first of all, sorry for my english, it's not my native language and I have a poor skills on this language)
At first, I want to say that I don't like to post bad reviews in this forum. I always prefer to post my good experiences in this world of hosting, like you can read in my previous messages about great companies like Bluewho and CrucialParadigm, in my opinion two of the best reseller companies around the world.
Two months ago, I needed to change some of my reseller accounts to a VPS, because I needed more features.
After read a lot of reviews I tryed FutureHosting to do the jump to VPS world. I read a lot of good opinions about this company, so I thought this company should be a good election.
After I ordered a Gold London based VPS on 24th february, the nightmare begun. In two month I had to open 27 support tickets.
One week after the account configuration, I began to receive the first alert messages, related to syslogd, DNS services, and I suffered about one server down a day. They suggest to order a monitoring service, so I did.
On 10th March and 11th March we suffered one severe server down, it seems it was related to named services again. Also, we suffered some problems with mailman.
On 15, 16 and 17th March I had problems with mailman again, nameservices, smtp and pop3... and we lost the access to Cpanel and WHM.
They suggest to order more RAM (at this moment I only hosted a 300 visit/day website —no forum, no MySQL high usage), so I ordered 384 Mb more.
On 17th March the problems increased and finally they tell me that they needed to re-install the VPS. The result was a 22 hours downtime until the VPS was online again and the account was restored again.
One the VPS was reinstalled I was still receiving some alerts about failed services (spamd, exim, syslogd...) and some websites are unavailable.
They fixed this error and we had no more problems in two weeks. But on 30th March we had again mailman problems. They fixed.
I was one week more without problems until yesterday when we begin to have severe problems related to mysql connections and a severe down server that affects all domains we had on the VPS. It seems they fixed, but in the past 8 hours I received alert messages about mysql failed, sshd failed, tailwatchd failed...
Finally, I migrated all websites to another VPS provider and it seems all is running fine.
Conclusion: one month and half after I ordered the VPS, I only had the VPS running fine two weeks, and the problems are still alive.
I still think FutureHosting is a great host company, and maybe I have only bad luck (there is always and exception and in this case I seem to be this one), this is why I still don't cancelled the account. But I need a solution.
PS: I have to say that technical support was always fast and kindly and always fixed the problems in a reasonable time.
PS2: I reported my main domain in order you be able to verify I'm using FutureHosting services.
I already have two virtual private servers with providers in the Chicago area, but I`m looking for another one that offers some level of managament/monitoring service. I don`t like keep all my eggs in the same basket!
I see Futurehosting offers servers from a Chicago facility, which I believe is Steadfast? They also offer for a few bucks extra, pro-active monitoring on two services.
I have found quite a few reviews for Futurehosting, but these are mostly in relation to their Texas and UK offerings.
Anyone here offer an insight into their Chicago operations, especially those who have been there more than a few weeks?
I would strongly recommend these guys to anyone out there who is looking for a good VPS provider.
In my initial question and answer with them they were prompt in answering my questions.
I have opened about 8 tickets since my signing up and every ticket has been responded to at least within an hour and communication prompt the whole way through the ticket process.
They migrated my server a while back when they had issues with the Dallas location. Flawless transition with good communication. I even scored an extra 194 dedicated RAM out of the move.
My plan provides:
30 Gig HD 450 Gig Bandwidth 512 MB Ram 194 MB sign up upgrade 194 MB Dallas Center thanks upgrade. Cpanel Managed Server
$49.95
Currently, they are offering 550 Gig bandwidth with the Platinum plan. If I had an issue with them, and I don't, it would be that I could not be upgraded to the 550 without losing my RAM upgrades.
I have Cpanel, Vbulletin, and Phpbb installed. Sitting idle they consume about 175 MB of RAM.
So, in closing I would recommend Futurehosting to anyone interested in a VPS.
With all of that being said..... I would like to give honorable mention to Knownhost who answered all of my questions just as fast as Future. The 194 RAM and a Cpanel were the differences for me... and for the same price I felt like I was getting a little more. If future folded... Known will be the next stop!
I just want to post this as a review of my hosting experience with Futurehosting
My story with them begins something like 2 months ago. I was previously with modvps.com, it worked well for a while at a great price (512mb VPS for only 39$), but I think they don't offer enough quality, I had many memory and CPU usage (never under 2.5!) problems (not justified in my opinion) specially when they removed the burst ram option, system became so unstable that I decided to leave them.
I started to look for alternate options, and I decided that futurehosting was the best option. good price and great reputation. I signed for their 786mb ram managed VPS (59$).
During the first month I was amazed of the performance of VPS. That was REALLY fast compared to modvps.
Don't know if this speaks well of futurehosting or bad of modvps.com, but the difference was HUGE. I have a moderately forum and all users agreed with the speed improvement.
The support was not so great, however, they usually take like an hour to reply tickets and only to say "I'm on this" (I guess for internal reference), and then another hour to reply it. Not really nice when you are usually asking for simple things. But I was not really worried as the service that they were giving was excellent.
After many years changing host, I was starting to believe this could be the near-to-perfect solution for me... until the BIG problems came.
one month and a half later with no problems at all, I decided to contract RVSkin and Fantastico addon. They proceed to install on my account but it looks like RVSkin it's not working. Fantastico does, but when I try to apply any RVSkin theme, I get timeout page errors. Not only it doesn't work, but it seems to affect rest of services, as many times I find httpd and exim down. Strange. I open a ticket. All I get are generic replies: "we are into this", "we rebooted the VPS and now works fine", "we reinstalled Cpanel", "maybe it's memory problem, we increased your limit". Nice, but after after a while all services down. One hour to reply the ticket to say they rebooted VPS. a few hours later all down again. again takes a while for them to reply, to say they increase mem limit. again, services down after a few hours. This situation is becoming worse and worse with the days, and the failure is more evident and short in time. At this point, I am really frustrated with situation, not only because the failure in service, but about the generic and not helpful replies I am getting. There is nothing worse than feeling that they don't care about this.
After one week of problems, I open a ticket to their admins, and now they seem to take care. They take a look to this, they start to try new things but after a few hours, they decide they can't find a solution for this and suggest to create a new VPS and move everything there, as it seems it's not a memory or CPU usage limit but a problem with Cpanel/RVSkin.
Not the best solution for me, but I can understand sometimes strange things happen and would sound reasonable to create a new VPS from scratch and avoid future problems with the current one.
So I create a new VPS, they move my accounts (many hours of waiting... not because they didn't help but because my accounts are big, but during the proccess of course VPS is still down). VPS seems to be running fine after the move, as fast as I was used to during the first month. That's great for me. I can understand that was a problem, not handled in the best way but it's everything working again, no problem.
But like two days after the VPS creation, ALL of my websites are down again. I can't access WHM or Cpanel or anything. Contact again support. Now it seems a DNS problem.
Maybe they should have cared about htis in my opinion, but that's ok. it was not the typical DNS change problem, there was something else, but I follow instructions, and after many hours of testing sites work.... but not updated! One of my sites appear updated only up to 26th July (date of the VPS creation), all from that date dissappeared, including hundreds of new messages in one of my forums. And I say "dissappeared" because many hours before the second crash I was able to check the new emails and messages on forums, now dissappeared.
Not only this site seems outdated, also WHM, in the list of accounts I miss one I created during the weekend.
It seems there has been any kind of misconfiguration between the old and new VPS, cause that WHM is not showing the changes applied during the weekend.
I open a new ticket again, and they said now it's solved... but not possible to recover the lost files and databases, and they ask for a backup.
Yeah, I know I should backup everything, but I was still in proccess of setting everything fine, it was less than two days of having the new VPS, and that weekend I was not in home so no virtually no time to make backups. At this point (now), I lost all my hope to recover the lost messages.
Having one week of problems was a pain, at the end all the service was restored, but this second problem was much worse for me: hundreds of messages in forums, emails, etc... all lost without a known reason, as I told before all I get are generic messages and I have the feeling that these is not going to be solved again, and now it looks like I lost many valuable info.
Please don't get me with the backup thing, endless redundancy, you get what you paid for... and so on. I *always* make backups but this time I didn't even had the time I think I tried to be reasonable. I never asked for something unrealistic, all I wanted were good explanations on what was going on. I can understand there is a problem, but I think they should have told me, I work in IT and I know sometimes **** happens, but I alwasy had felt they were not really into the problem. It was not until I asked the admins about this that I got response, seemed solved and now this again.
So now I think it's time to move. I am very sad because their VPS performance was amazing while it lasted... by far the best hosting I ever experienced (and I tried so many... believe me!), but it's not acceptable to get this kind of support.
I really don't want to post to this forum, but more than 20 hours of downtime is really "amazing". I have vps account for about 4 months with futurehosting and everything just OK, support answer fast. But yesterday suddenly they just suspend my VPS with CPU abuse reason. I respond to them to find the solution in order to get the vps back to online, but instead they are not responding to my ticket.
I'm trying to remove some account to reduce the load and ask their feedback -> no respond... send more ticket feedbacks -> no respond... finally, trying to ask how to migrate existing accounts -> no respond...
I just trying to resolve this problem quickly by perhaps terminate some accounts that might cause the load, but their ignorance really pissed me off.
Has anyone here had past experience with FutureHosting.biz (VPS providers)? I have just bought an account there with a 95% discount, so I would like to know if it really is too good to be true.
Stumbled across the forum while searching for a vps plan..
I currently run a dedicated server, and i'm sick of managing the whole thing via command line. I'm after something I can easily manage my many domains (6 all up) some that are pushing in excess of 3million hits a month..
I'm looking at powervps linux cpanel power2 plan, or titanium plan from future host..
I'm after a fair bit of bandwidth, at least 512mb of ram (preferably more) since I run a few tomcat applications, cpanel with whm. But really, I just want everything set up out of the box, mail servers, binddns, etc. etc I'd reinstall php and mysql as i'd want 5 and 5.
I have been with futurehosting since October 2007 and have had my ups and downs. see my history below:
October 2007: Signed up for both a vps in chicago and one in dallas datacenter. I used my chicago server for my primary hosting and my dallas server is used only for DNS failover for 2 websites. I am a small town host that hosts locally only so we have around 15 clients. Everything was working ok, but the chicago server just always seemed slow, ocasional load spikes throughout the day hitting the 5 or 6’s. So finally in May 2009 I posted on WHT to seek some help for why loads were so high and we came to the conclusion in that thread that it must be an overloaded server. So I shot off a ticket to futurehosting to move me to a different node and they did without any problems. Loads seemed to go way down after the move and my server was zippy fast again.
August 2009: My chicago server has been getting progressivly slower throughout the last 3 months and we are back to load spikes again. I finally give up with the load issue and just assume it is my problem.
September 11, 2009: Now I run into a problem with php handeling sessions and ask for help from futurehosting and have a problem with them lying to me. You can see the thread here. Jim at futurehosting is aware of this and apologized deeply. And they reprimanded the admin working on my case.
September 21, 2009: I migrated my chicago server to Wiredtree and still have my dallas server as my backup with futurehosting. Since moving to Wiredtree, all of my load issues have gone away and load sits around 0.25 average.
Please note that in all these cases I have opened tickets with futurehosting and worked with them through the problems.
Now, after I got my history out of the way, here is my review:
Value: 10/10
futurehosting is one of the best values around especially now with their 40% off for life and more ram. I, as an existing customer even submitted a ticket complaining how new customers get this and we as exhisting don’t and they gave me the discount.
Support: 7/10
I think the support of futurehosting is a little below of top tier. When you submit a ticket with futurehosting after 15 min you get a reply stating “we’re working on it”. Then sometimes after 30 min you get a reply “we’re escelating this to sysadmins”. And finally after 45 min the problem is fixed. Now keep in mind this is just one instance, but almos all receive a first ticket stating “we’re working on it” and then 15 min later it’s fixed. Now, I really don’t have much to compare to here other than wiredtree, and when you submit a ticket to them, 15 min later you get a response “fixed”. Now about the server admin lying directly to me when he couldn’t fix the problem. I realise this is a rare isolated instance, but still put a sour taste in my mouth.
Server Performance: 5/10
Performance was good at times bad at times and overall seemed slow at futurehosting. I think, but not sure that maybe they are overloading their servers…
Server Uptime: 10/10
Server was always up, and I mean always. Only around once or twice in two years was there a problem with DDOS on another server that caused routing problems in the datacenter to cause my server to be unreachable.
I hav enever had any problems with my server in dallas and it is always fast and zippy and never down. I have also never really submitted a ticket on my server in dallas because it is used so infrequently. We, however are leaving futurehosting and will be in process of moving our dallas server away from them soon.
Well, there you have it, my review of futurehosting after two years.
I signed up with FutureHosting.com in June of 2007 when my site's traffic was too much for the shared hosting account at GoDaddy (their hosting is horrendous, btw). After looking around WHT here, I discovered a relatively new VPS hosting company called FutureHosting.biz and, because of their great prices, I decided to give them a try.
Having no idea about anything related to managing a server (and still don't, for the most part), the extra $5/month was definitely worth it. Their support is very prompt to respond to tickets. I think the longest I've ever waited is about 30 minutes, but that typically their response time is about 10-15 minutes. If the situation is something they can solve for you, they do it, rather than spitting back a step-by-step tutorial on how to fix it or make the necessary changes yourself.
A couple situations that are noteworthy:
1. Apache kept going down on my VPS fairly regularly. Since I didn't have the automatic ping service, it would be down for up to a day at a time before I realized it. They would kindly restart apache for me each time, but after a couple weeks of it, I started to complain. They told me about the ping service, but I didn't see why I should pay for an additional service to keep my sites online when their hosting service couldn't do that on it's own. Why should I pay for a service that can't stay online and then pay more for a service to be notified each time it went down? Vik, the owner, contacted me and said they would add the ping service to my account for no extra charge. Fortunately, Apache hasn't screwed up much since then anyway.
2. There have been several times when FutureHosting went out of their way to help me fix problems or address issues that technically weren't even their problems. For example, I was having trouble with a certain CMS and they helped me troubleshoot it and get to the root issue even though it didn't really have too much to do with the VPS.
3. More recently I had them compile Red5 on my VPS so I can integrate video recording with one of my sites. Unfortunately, it kept failing because it requires at least 1 GB of available memory, and at the time my VPS only had 768 MB total. So, rather than making me go all the way up to a dedicated server just to experiment with my new site, they created a custom package for me and threw in 384 MB for FREE!
A couple things I wish were different.
1. I wish they had a phone number (or Skype account) to call for emergencies (like when sites go down or something).
2. I wish they had live chat on their support site.
3. I wish that when support finishes upgrading PHP, MySQL, restoring something from a backup for me, or whatever, that they'd actually check my site to make sure it's up and running. Too often they complete the support ticket, only for me to come back later and say, "Thanks for doing the upgrade/restore/fix for me so promptly, but none of my sites are responding, or they have an Internal Server Error message displayed." Of course they go back and make the correction fairly quickly, but that last little step would be greatly appreciated.
SUMMARY: I've found that FutureHosting is always very sensitive to the needs of their clients, and that they also value their client's opinions very highly on a personal level. The past year and a half with them have not been perfect, but I am definitely a loyal customer and will probably never use another webhost as long as they're around. Overall, I'd give them 9/10 stars.
P.S. I see I'm supposed to verify my domain in order to make this review legit, so if an admin or mod wants to contact me about how to do that, that would be fine.
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.
The following is my review of FutureHosting.com. I am currently hosting with them using one of their "Elite Managed VPS" products. I will be reviewing FutureHosting.com on the following criteria Price Performance Stability Support Each section will contain a score of 1(poor)-10(excellent)
Introduction:
I switched over to FutureHosting late last year after Zone.net unraveled. The following is my six month review of my hosting experience with FutureHosting.com.
Price:
Pricing is very competitive to other providers. When coupled with WHT offers the hosting packages can be very attractive.
Rating: 9 (very good)
Performance:
Performance has been fairly good. I have had some issues with SMTP timeouts over the last month and I am currently experiencing some lag on a new VPS. I am confident that support should be able to resolve these issues.
Rating: 7 (good)
Stability:
Site uptime has been very good and I have had only minor hiccups in my SMTP service.
Rating: 8 (good)
Support:
Support has been very quick to respond to my initial tickets -- usually within 15 minutes (for example I just opened a low priority ticket and I can see that 10 minutes later support has already logged into my server to install an application for me). The only issue I currently have with support is that they don't always communicate what was causing an issue and what they did to your server to resolve it (something I like to be aware of). Additionally, some of the new techs who are learning don't always read through the support request so you have to go back and forth to fully explain the issue. Arun, Alex and the other veteran tech's are very very helpful though (I have had a significant number of tickets with Arun and he has been excellent despite my many requests).
Rating: 8 (good)
Conclusion:
Six months into my time with FutureHosting and I have been pleased so far with their service. The price is great, performance is good, and support has been very responsive. I would gladly recommend Futurehosting to other WHT users.
I emailed sales and asked specifically about running Tomcat on the server as I have a java webapp I'm testing and trying to get running.
Sales were responsive and confirmed Tomcat was ok to run and recommended a plan which I went with.
My experiences so far: Support up to now has been very responsive.
My concerns:
I asked for Java and Tomcat to be installed. They were, but today I found that:
- Java had reverted to an old version
- Tomcat which was version 5.5.23 now appears to be 5.5.25 and is in a different directory (5.5.23 was in /var/lib/tomcat5/, 5.5.25 now in /home/cpeasyapache/src/apache-tomcat-5.5.25/. In addition, the config file tomcat-users.xml no longer had the manager role in it. I have re-added it but attempting to login fails every time.
Why am I disappointed? I asked specifically in my support ticket why Java disappeared. No real answer and I have wasted much time trying to get a java webapp deployed without having to also contend with outside influences changing Java and Tomcat without my knowledge until I discovered these problems.
