Futurehosting: A Long-time Client Update

Recently however it seems they're getting some bad press, most people are blaming growing pains.

As someone who's seen the before and after picture, i thought i'd chime in and actually put some positive notes on these boards, as I know these guys deserve more credit than this! It's one of those situations where if something goes wrong, people complain, if everything is right, not enough people speak up!

Server speed / specs:
one word: fantastic. i now have 2 VPSs with them - one in their new data center. I had moved the 2nd VPS from another host (also very well known on these boards, who I won't mention) where I had been having loads of issues regarding load and IO wait times. Load would spike up to 20+, server would crash, reboot, and this would happen 20+ times a day. Nothing critical on that server. Post-migration, using very very similar specs on futurehosting, and the load has been <0.10 since I started her up 3 days ago.

My current server sees load going up once in a while - during a large scale DOS attack last month the load only went up to 4, with over 1000 TCP connections. I only realized there was an issue as I checked one of my status scripts and noticed the enormous tcp count. I've recently moved to a new VPS on a new node, and load has been incredible, along with responsiveness.

No complaints at all on that front.

Network performance
Their old data center, softlayer, has much to be desired. There has been at least one outage every month so far which lasts in the hours duration. However, FH has made the very wise option of expanding out to a new datacenter and will hopefully slowly phase out softlayer, which has become quite pathetic. Connectivity wise though (speed/bandwidth) - no complaints.

Support
I remember getting a response within minutes months ago. However, that being said, months ago the customer service could only deal with the most basic of problems, and would escalate the issue if it was complicated, which would take time for a response.

FH did go through a growing pains phase a little while ago with regards to customer service - you wouldn't get a response too quick.

However now it seems they have begun improving. They are expanding their support base, and if you deal with the support guys you'll definitely be impressed by how dedicated and "hardcore" they are. Very recently I had a major issue with my server - it got compromised via root and someone wreaked havoc. Some script was installed that basically self-DOS'ed the server and basically killed it.

FH support instantly shut down the server and put me back up on my old server which I had migrated from only a week ago. They thoroughly went through and wiped clean my current server, fully bullet-proofed it and cleaned up the security of it all (something that was not a problem when they set it up - but rather my fault over time as I had disabled some very silly things I shouldn't have...) The guy working on the server, Jim, worked his *** off, pulled an all nighter (he was still responding to my tickets at 9am GMT, which was 4am his time - and I know he's not a night shift guy!). By the end of it all, he put me back onto my current newly-secured server, and was still revving to go, asking me what I wanted and to give him another challenge!

So, to sum this section--
good attitude: check
know-how: check
laziness: none.

I guarantee one thing - the vps company I just moved my 2nd vps from in this situation would not have spent an entire night rebuilding my server the way it was, but would've simply put me back on my old one week image, said "oh well, sorry, bad luck" and moved on.

All in all, my experience with these guys over the past couple of weeks (since the new data center opened) has been nothing short of positive, and I know they're rising out of the slight slump they had gotten themselves into.

I'll submit my URL to the mod to verify this post. And no, I don't work with FH