Suggested new hosting provider

[sylvano]

Hi,

Who has suggestions for a new hosting provider?

Thanks.

[skolnick]

I'm doing research. The challenge is finding a good all-in-one instead of a web place, an email place, a database place, ....

FQ hasn't communicated sufficiently publicly or directly to give me confidence that the string of recent failures is not a sign of things to come. I've done this sort of work myself professionally working for CSC. I've been here a long time in large part because I just didn't have to think about it. Everything just worked. Now it has stopped working. Do the math.

[Syneryder]

I'd feel awkward recommending another host here (if I did have one to suggest), but I can say that I'm not satisfied with Dreamhost. Dreamhost sites often felt slow to me, and once I started monitoring it with the free tier of Ahrefs Dashboard I discovered my Dreamhost sites were often timing out and not sending data to visitors at all.

I'm still using FutureQuest for web hosting of my main domain, but I shifted the DNS elsewhere (so my DNS is not impacted by network outages, and the new DNS had faster response times). I also switched my email servers to Fastmail. So far I'm really happy with Fastmail, it's much faster & more reliable, and working well with my desktop & mobile email clients. Learning to setup my SPF & MX DNS records manually has been a pain, but I'm glad that I figured it out and it seems to have made email delivery more reliable too.

I'm considering adding back the FQ nameservers & mailservers as lower priority backups, so I don't have any one provider as a single point of failure.

[photoruss]

I feel badly posting this info, also, but I just want to help, because I took great care with my move and felt like I was starting from zero knowledge. I've felt like part of a family at FQ for ~18 years, but I've known for a while that I needed to make a change. I do feel like I'm betraying family, and would feel awful if I felt I was doing anything to further hurt the situation and great people at FQ. The recent issues only accelerated my planned move by a month or two. This is how I found my new provider:

At the top of my criteria were A) being highly rated, reliable, and low cost (of course), B) storage space allowance that I won't outgrow, and C) a focus on email hosting because I have ~4GB of primary email accounts that are the most important for me. I also thought it would be good if the new host uses the standard CPanel interface, so future host switching would be more seamlessly switchable. For my 25 years of owning domains, I've been on only one other small company before FQ, and I did NOT want to move to a large company like GoDaddy or the Endurance brands (endurance.com/our-brands). My short list came down to DreamHost.com, A2Hosting.com, Hostinger.com, and WebHostingHub.com. I chose A2Hosting.com because their storage space initial threshold limit is 50GB, they're very highly rated all around, have phone tech support and co-located data centers. I prepaid for 3 years for $143, and after three years, the renewal is notably higher than that promo rate, but if things keep going the way they are, I’ll have no qualms paying the renewal rate at that time.

I initially moved all my domains to A2 except the primary domain, so I could comfortably get my new environment up and configured before moving over my mission-critical domain. I kept NetSol.com as my registrar, and only had to update DNS records, but A2 have registrar services that you can transfer into, as well. It took me about 3 weeks from when I opened the account, until I had everything fully migrated, verified, and configured like I wanted, which I don't think is terrible considering that I have a 'day job' and a family. The tech support has been really great over the past month as I got everything going – same caliber as FQ, and nice to have the phone support option for the one time I used it. Also, I will say that the A2 email platform (and web mail interface) is very, very fast -- which is what I was primarily hoping for, after having so much trouble with mail/questmail as my email account grew -- and the A2 mail platform is not fazed in the least with my large mail account. The CPanel setup is good once you learn the terminology and where everything is, and I love that the server automatically sets up the https/SSL/TLS certificates so there are no security warning issues accessing the domains or email (I apparently have 101 auto-renewing certificates across my 13 domains – this didn’t exist as a concern 18 years ago).

Here are some of my research links that I used:

https://www.quicksprout.com/web-hosting-uptime/
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best...sting-services
https://www.hostingadvice.com/best/
https://hostadvice.com/hosting-services/email-hosting/
https://www.whtop.com/best
https://hostingfacts.com/
https://www.trustpilot.com/categorie...osting_service

I will miss FQ, and had a great run except toward the end. YMMV, but I sincerely hope my story helps, and wish you all the best going forward.

Russ

Originally Posted by photoruss

I feel badly posting this info, also, but I just want to help, because I took great care with my move and felt like I was starting from zero knowledge. I've felt like part of a family at FQ for ~18 years, but I've known for a while that I needed to make a change. I do feel like I'm betraying family, and would feel awful if I felt I was doing anything to further hurt the situation and great people at FQ. The recent issues only accelerated my planned move by a month or two. This is how I found my new provider:

At the top of my criteria were A) being highly rated, reliable, and low cost (of course), B) storage space allowance that I won't outgrow, and C) a focus on email hosting because I have ~4GB of primary email accounts that are the most important for me. I also thought it would be good if the new host uses the standard CPanel interface, so future host switching would be more seamlessly switchable. For my 25 years of owning domains, I've been on only one other small company before FQ, and I did NOT want to move to a large company like GoDaddy or the Endurance brands (endurance.com/our-brands). My short list came down to DreamHost.com, A2Hosting.com, Hostinger.com, and WebHostingHub.com. I chose A2Hosting.com because their storage space initial threshold limit is 50GB, they're very highly rated all around, have phone tech support and co-located data centers. I prepaid for 3 years for $143, and after three years, the renewal is notably higher than that promo rate, but if things keep going the way they are, I’ll have no qualms paying the renewal rate at that time.

I initially moved all my domains to A2 except the primary domain, so I could comfortably get my new environment up and configured before moving over my mission-critical domain. I kept NetSol.com as my registrar, and only had to update DNS records, but A2 have registrar services that you can transfer into, as well. It took me about 3 weeks from when I opened the account, until I had everything fully migrated, verified, and configured like I wanted, which I don't think is terrible considering that I have a 'day job' and a family. The tech support has been really great over the past month as I got everything going – same caliber as FQ, and nice to have the phone support option for the one time I used it. Also, I will say that the A2 email platform (and web mail interface) is very, very fast -- which is what I was primarily hoping for, after having so much trouble with mail/questmail as my email account grew -- and the A2 mail platform is not fazed in the least with my large mail account. The CPanel setup is good once you learn the terminology and where everything is, and I love that the server automatically sets up the https/SSL/TLS certificates so there are no security warning issues accessing the domains or email (I apparently have 101 auto-renewing certificates across my 13 domains – this didn’t exist as a concern 18 years ago).

Here are some of my research links that I used:

https://www.quicksprout.com/web-hosting-uptime/
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best...sting-services
https://www.hostingadvice.com/best/
https://hostadvice.com/hosting-services/email-hosting/
https://www.whtop.com/best
https://hostingfacts.com/
https://www.trustpilot.com/categorie...osting_service

I will miss FQ, and had a great run except toward the end. YMMV, but I sincerely hope my story helps, and wish you all the best going forward.

Russ

Thank you for your research. FQuest should be commended for hosting an open forum where customers and prospective customers can discuss issues.

We are wary of hosts that wish to hook you with 3 year engagements and offer low starting monthly prices.

We have used Pair in the past and would consider them as an alternative. But the A2 appears impressive.

For now customer #37 will stick it out with FutureQuest.

To get around their lack of required standards such as GZIP, HTTP/2 (and soon HTTP/3) , HSTS, SSD, LSWS etc. you can use Amazon AWS to do the heavy lifting. It costs more than the Fquest package itself but gets the work done.

Perhaps we will be surprised soon by an infrastructure upgrade announcement by FutureQuest. Hope springs eternal.

[johnfl68]

I had been using Linode, but got bit a few times with ongoing issues at their Atlanta data center.

I have everything (6 servers) at RamNode now.
They have a few different data centers to choose from, and a few different server configurations to choose from as well based on how much power you need.

Defiantly more of a do it your self host, with little added features, but if you are more apt to do everything yourself then they might be a good fit for you. They have several different Linux images available to install from, or upload your own ISO. No problems keeping things up to date, you just need to do run updates on your own every week or so. They seem to push core system security updates frequently as well.

No email included, but I just spun up a smaller server there with Mail-in-a-Box. If a small single site you can probably do both web and email on the same machine, with several servers it was better for me to do a separate one for email.

Also you need to handle your own DNS, there are several options, I use DNS Made Easy, because they were a good fit for automatic domain failover to backup servers.

Downtime has been minimal the past few years, and they are usually quick to resolve and good to communicate what is going on via Twitter @NodeStatus and status.ramnode.com status page. They are usually quick to answer Support Tickets as well, usually around 30 minutes.

I've been happy with them for my needs, they may not fit for everyone, but could be a good option for some that are looking for other places.

Good luck everyone.

John

[sylvano]

thanks for the info everyone - I like futurequest, recent issues aside, but I do feel obliged to research and prepare contingencies.

[kevin21]

Site ground, Hostgator, bigrock, Godaddy

[cjmaloof]

From the perspective of a hobbyist user.

I've had my hobby website on Futurequest since 2006 and haven't really thought about it since then. Didn't even notice whatever outages occured; I don't use the e-mail system and if there was a site outage nobody complained to me. A few months ago I started coding up a second hobby site and assumed I'd need a new hosting provider for it that would handle multiple domains. I kind of wanted to do that anyway, since I don't think FQ has updated software versions in ages and I figured prices would have gone down since then.

I checked out various options and signed up with Namecheap, in the course of which I discovered:

• FQ's low-end prices are actually still normal and competitive;
• Namecheap runs Python 2.6 which is even lower than FQ does and doesn't meet my MySQL connection needs
• Namecheap's knowledge base is not as reliable as it looked

and (unfortunately not until) last:

• FQ has a perfectly functional "IRM" system to add an extra domain that seems to have worked great

So I cancelled Namecheap and I'm staying here after all.

[Press]

Has FQ offered any credits on renewals yet? Got my bill, I've asked and no response has been received.

Thx for all the research