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There is this Future Engineer Standard option, is this required?
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Futurehosting operates from a good menu model of hosting. In the unmanaged (self-managed) hosting industry, they've created a premium-grade service.
It operates using:
- multiple datacenters around the world (mostly USA and Europe),
- quality hardware,
- quality bandwidth,
- commercial software infrastructure (Virtuozzo, not OpenVZ/KVM/etc),
- and an in-house customer support panel that (in my opinion) surpasses both WHMCS and Parallels BA.
That all takes money. So their base plans (512MB, no panel) start at about $25/monthly.
Compare it to hosts who cut corners on hardware, commercial software, etc, and that's how you get cheap VPS plans in the $5-15 range.
Now in addition to the standard VPS, you can require further software licenses (panels) and managed support (reactive or proactive).
- cPanel and Plesk are available at the amazingly low price of about $4 bundled into a with-panel VPS plan.
- Reactive management ("Help me install/do ___.") is another $5/monthly, which is very inexpensive.
- Or proactive management is $13/month, which is also inexpensive.
Now when it comes to their managed support, I'd say it was good, but maybe not "premium" necessarily, though it comes close. At a premium host, most all techs tend to know everything, within a wide girth of usual tasks, including non-basic tasks. For example, how to install RoundCube into a Plesk VPS. At a non-premium host, you get levels of comprehension between techs, so they may play "musical techs" (musical chairs) a bit, until the right tech knows how to do what you need done. But FH isn't bad by any means.
If you want managed hosting, order the management off the menu.
Sometimes their coupon deals (which we post in this forum's
Online Shopping Deals subforum) include managed plans.
I used Futurehosting's reactive management, and it was fine.
I tried their proactive hosting when it first came out, and was underwhelmed. But that was a while ago; it's probably better now.
For comparison sake, I do proactive VPS management for a limited number of clients, and it comes out to $29/month for standard service after the first month. The first month is more, because properly securing a server, and tweaking it for the needs of the user, can take a number of hours. And our pricing for management is so cheap that sometimes people won't even take it seriously. So FH pricing of $13/month is a ridiculously low. Note that most of our clients opt for more than the standard service, too -- so it's more than $29/monthly (help with PR, SEO, CMS management, etc).
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Or you think I should get him to switch to Futurehosting with the lowest plan, since he doesn't need all that space now... then in future then upgrade to the 50GB space? Is there any upgrading promotion for existing customers?
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When you buy a VPS, you're mostly buying the RAM in the plan. Disk space is secondary.
You really need 512MB bare minimum for a cPanel VPS (possibly cutting off services like SpamAssassin or mail entirely), 768MB minimum to run all default services, and then 1GB is suggested for smoothest operations when getting some mild traffic. For heavy traffic, 2GB to 4GB is suggested. One of our cPanel VPS is 8GB at
EuroVPS, because of what it has running. Disk space use is minimal, and CPU use is minimal. It's the RAM that gets used. The VPS mostly runs applications and email, not sites.
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Just seeking your opinion, in case we need to shift......
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Don't be this guy:
kpmedia-grassgreener-watermarked.jpg
The grass isn't always greener. Sometimes it just gets your head stuck in a fence.
Note that this is NOT just a photo I randomly found online -- it's one of my own photographs from around 2007 or 2008. Shortly after shooting this image, I had to help the dumb@ss goat get his head out of the fence. Goats make this horrible noise ("MA-AA-AHHH!!!! MA-AA-AHHHH!!!!"), which sort of sounds like a sheep crying and screaming at the same time, when stuck in a fence. And while you may be trying to help the goat, he/she doesn't understand this. So they're fighting both you and the fence, which can really injure them in the process.
