Experience With Futurehosting

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.