Posts Tagged ‘future hosting review’

I Love Future Hosting

I Love Future Hosting

Well the title is pretty obvious that I really like Future Hosting as my VPS host.  After going through a site transfer and lost database this week(which was my fault but fortunately Future Hosting had backed up and restored) I have continued to be so impressed with Future Hosting support that I wanted to write this honest review.

I have used Future Hosting for about a year and having dealt with other popular shared hosts I was looking for a bigger hosting solution other than the common shared hosts like Bluehost, Hostgator, Justhost, etc…

For those that have never had a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or dedicated server it is not really that big of a deal to move up. Most people jump up from a shared or reseller hosting account to a VPS account and then eventually up to a dedicated server. Generally, if you decide to get a VPS/dedicated hosting package then it is best to go with a host that is focused on VPS or dedicated hosting solutions vs. using a host that focuses on low priced shared hosting. I have read many reviews of people who loved their low-priced shared host provider but when they upgraded to VPS/dedicated they were dissapointed.

For a new VPS hosting provider, I most definitely wanted a managed server so i would have support and updated security/software.  I did looked at the popular VPS hosts that have a good reputation like ServInt and Liquidweb but after reading through reviews on well known unbiased hosting forums  and comparing prices, I went with Future Hosting.

Yes, there are some lower priced VPS hosts but Future Hosting is pretty good price for what you get and their support is phenomenal and I never have downtime. Future Hosting allows you to choose among a half dozen regional server locations to have server located at and they have provided free upgrades like additional storage and memory speed when they upgraded the servers.

I have used their support over the last year on at least a dozen occasions for adding software, server configuration changes to get a wordpress plugin to work, and moving sites around. I am not really into learning how to do all the behind the scenes server login/secure server shell process stuff as I don’t have the time or patience to make sure I am doing it right so I would rather have a reliable and fast support desk to ask to do it for me.

Not once in those times that I  used support did I ever wait more than 10minutes to at least get an update/reply that they were working on it,etc…(even on tickets I marked low importance)…They have an excellent support portal and ticketing system (which many lower priced or small hosts severely lack)

Anyways, I just wanted to post how happy I am with them and they have great pricing, support and reliability. Check out Future Hosting if you are in the market for a Virtual Private Server(VPS) or Dedicated Server. VPS start at under $20/month and they do have specials that come up occasionally.

PS- If you have never used a VPS or Dedicated server and are comparing hosts, make sure to compare add-ons between host.

Some things to think about when shopping for VPS/Dedicated hosting:

  • CPANEL is usually an add-on cost.
  • Compare how many IP addresses are included with your account and how much additional IP’s cost. A key benefit is of VPS/Dedicated accounts is having ability to have sites spread across multiple IP addresses(preferable with different C-classes.
  • Some software that usually comes standard with shared hosts like Fantastico for site installs is extra.
  • What server management software is used. Most use WHM which works well with CPANEL.
  • Focus on Memory RAM/processors when comparing (less on storage).
  • Make sure you understand what is provided with managed, semi-managed,unmanaged accounts.
  • And lastly make sure you use the linux server for wordpress sites and if you have any special needs for a software you run then ask the hosting BEFORE you sign up if they can install it or make sure their server works with it

Products I Use

Products I Use

REVISED: 1/1/2012: If you are lost in internet marketing and need to focus on following a path to success then I think you can do very well with either Consumer Wealth System or Unstoppable affiliate courses mentioned below. Both are put together by very ethical marketers that really care about the success of their students. Consumer wealth system focuses on promoting physical products as an affiliate and Unstoppable affiliate is more about promoting CPA/information type products although you can do amazon/physical products too. 

I thought I would just have this page for keeping track of which products I use and find useful. If you have read through this blog you will notice that I don’t recommend products unless I actually like them or use them(vs. many affiliate sites recommend EVERYTHING for the payout).

FULL DISCLOSURE – I MAY GET A REFERRAL COMMISSION ON SOME OF THESE PRODUCTS BUT THAT DOESN’T MY OPINIONS AS THERE ARE HIGHER PAYING PRODUCTS OUT THERE THAT ARE INFERIOR THAT I COULD RECOMMEND IF I WAS FOCUSED ON COMMISSIONS

Understand that my main area of focus is niche sites with some automation if possible so that is what the products are focused on but I also dabble in other internet marketing areas.

Information Products

I think anyone who has tried to make money or get started in internet marketing is easily overwhelmed and disappointed by the constant barrage of ebooks, “make money online” courses and just overall crappy affiliate marketing informational products pushed by affiliate marketers. I honestly only have found a couple informational product that I recommend that actually gives you the methods/tools for making money and don’t leave you with more questions than answers. There are probably other legitimate, quality informational IM products out there but I can only pass on what I have tried/like.

Unstoppable Affiliate – This is top-notch course that came out in August 2011. Only reason I even looked at it was because it was created by super-affiliate Andrew Hansen that is one of the few “gurus” that cares more about helping his customers than selling you on more products. It will teach you how to build successful affiliate websites and how to rank them at the top of google. It is a detailed video course that covers everything. I think anyone that has been hurt by google ranking in past or doesn’t know how to really get a site to rank successfully for long-term success then this is the course for you. It really is a terrific course and will teach you invaluable skills about keyword targeting, converting visitors, salescopy,etc..to build really successful authority affiliate sites. Honestly, if you focus on this course only with the understanding that it takes a little time to rank a site(not overnight riches) and follow the steps in the course then I would be surprised if you aren’t successful in affiliate marketing after this. I’ll write a review eventually on this but here is the Unstoppable Affiliate Site

Consumer Wealth System – Consumer Wealth system is a course put out by 2 super affiliate run a huge network of sites and the 2nd largest SEO company in Australia(They have a team of 60 outsourcers) so the are the real deal. In Consumer Wealth System they teach how to create affiliate product sites that rank well, convert well, and lay out in over 40 vidoes step-by-step for even the newest beginner. This is an absolutely phenomenal course for how to make a living online promoting physical products.

Autoblog Blueprint - I have reviewed Autoblog Blueprint on this site and emphasized how good it is. IT IS NOW CLOSED AS THE CREATOR INTEGRATES IT INTO A LARGER TRAINING SITE (Profit.fm)

Rogue Marketing Media Buying – See my review on it. Really is an excellent information product consisting of a  large step-by-step ebook and more supplemental videos and guides are still be added. I liked the program because it really goes through every step of researching and effectively building up a media buy campaign at an initial small scale. Rather than just telling you to go blow thousands of dollars testing a media buy campaign. It really is a quality, very well laid out product without an hype.

OneLung Thin – Yes, weird name but I came across this product from within Phpbay forums and if you are a Ebay Affiliate(EPN) then you MUST but this product as the tracking software product is worth 10x the low $20 cost. This course will show you how to geo-target your ebay affiliate ads, properly set up your sites, prevent fradulent clicks which can hurt your EPC rates and more. The tracking software that you install will show every ebay auction that was clicked to you can see which products are getting the most attention. Check out the site, best money ever spent if you are an ebay partner network affiliate.

Hosting

Hostgator - for shared hosting, I think they are the best for the money and the support is the best there is. See my posts 1 & 2 about hosting. (I mention other hosting providers on those review post that I like too)

Future Hosting - For VPS/Dedicated Servers I like Future hosting. They have multiple data center locations and their support is excellent. Also for the money I find that they offered the best features for memory/bandwidth/storage,etc….that I could find and they are based in USA(I prefer local country support)

Software

PhpBay / PhpZon – Both PhpBay & PhpZon are by the same developer and are excellent products. You can use them to quickly add ebay auctions or amazon products into your site very easily with very customizable templates and layouts. Both plugins are well regarded among many affiliates and is generally considered the best software for inserting affiliate ads of Amazon products and Ebay auctions into your sites. I use the plugin version of both of these products for my wordpress autoblogs and they work with auto templating tags if you wanted to use it with other content plugins like WPRobot or WP Mage. The importance of  phpbay is that it has some advanced security features to keep clickbots from hitting your sites and creating fraudulent clicks with your ebay account.

Tweetattacks – Best twitter automation software I know of but with the massive amount of twitter tools constantly coming out it is tough to say. See my review of the product here. Its is the only software I know of that works from the Web instead of through Twitter’s API so have less of a change of getting banned by twitter. You can upload all your twitter account and proxies to it.  If is constantly being improved but it has features for autoposting, autofollowing, unfollowing, automated replies based on keywords searches,etc……..the list goes on. The support is excellent

WP Robot – A very good software suite for creating and monetizing autoblog sites. It offers ability create posts with content from many sources, important product feeds from popular places like amazon, ebay and affiliate networks, cloak links, mix content templates and so much more. There are other software product that try to offer similar features like WP Mage but I think WP Robot is the best and the most cutting edge in providing constant updates. For the price  and support it is very hard to beat. Their website does a good job showing all their features. I think that WP Robot is better than WP Mage now in that WP Robot continues to innovate and add more functionality whereas there really hasn’t been much change or improvements in WP Mage in the last year. WP Robot price is very good. NOTE : Realize that with with google continuing to get smarter with discerning quality vs. junk sites that you need to have a good foundation of how to build a Quality autoblog vs. the junk spam that is out there. Therefore, while you could use WP robot to blast out lots of garbage site in mass, I don’t recommend that strategy and it won’t work long term. 

Reviewazon – A plugin for wordpress that allows your dozens of ways to integrate Amazon.com products into your websites. It is by the far the most advanced plugin for using Amazon product information on your sites, so if you are an Amazon affiliate this really is a must have plugin. The new Reviewazon 2.0 is phenomenal for being able to quickly integrate pretty much any component/field of a product listed in Amazon.com and be able to integrate link cloaking, product cache to reducing calls to amazon API, bulk product posting for autoblogs,etc….Check out the Reviewazon Site for more info. Product has phenomenal support.

Keyword Tools :

I have used lots of keyword tools like Market Samurai, Traffic Travis,etc…but the one that I really like the most right now is Long Tail Pro. Longtail Pro is very fast as evaluating keyword competition and provides the information I need fast.

For some other WordPress plugin I like I wrote a post you can view here (realize it is easy to start using too many plugins so keep it simple and dont overdo it with plugins)

…………

I will add to this post as I find more products that I use and like.

**** Full Disclosure – I may make a referral commission on products featured on this page ****

Hosting Company Review Update

Hosting Company Review Update

Just thought I would follow up quickly after my 1st summary post on various hosting companies and types of hosting plans. Over the last week I have moved around 3 hosting accounts and had to configure a VPS at a new host.

SHARED HOSTING :

Hostgator is still tops for me for shared hosting. The more I have dealt with other hosting companies support, the more I realize how superior Host Gator’s support is for response time. I have only used Hostgator’s shared plan and I have maxed out a couple shared accounts there due to bandwidth usage and size of files on my account (I was over 80,000 inodes on the account) that it began to effect page load speeds.  I will say that no other shared hosting provider had ever let me load as much and use a much CPU/bandwidth as Hostgator does. (Stay away from Super Green and Just Host)

Many shared hosting providers will advertise unlimited everything but in the fine print the thing that will usually get you is CPU usage. If you are loading lots of files like a website where visitors download from your site or you have higher traffic, then you will probably hit the CPU limits and some hosts without warning will just freeze your account.  The main issue I faced with “cheap” shared hosting was their load speed and server timing out. Some hosts overload their shared servers. I never experienced that among my 6 Host Gator accounts.

Also, Hostgator shared hosting servers have all the latest software and behind-the-scenes server side software/settings that a lot of various wordpress plugins and software need to run vs. other hosts I have did not have the right software/settings and created errors and back-and-forth replies with tech support.

I opened a test shared hosting account with Cool Handle Hosting so I could test some new autoblog and twitter software. They have a deal this month where shared hosting starts at only $10 for entire year. So far the support has been decent but slower than Hostgator, but the servers seem to load fast and I am running 2 sites right now on it with up to 50 posts a day between 2 sites with images in each post.

I will probably max it would pretty quick because like I said above if my site has lots of videos or images that need to load every time a visitor clicks on the page then you can sucks up CPU and Bandwidth pretty quick. Overall though Cool Handle has been good and they are responsive with requests. If you can get the $10 for entire year, it is well worth it.

Reseller Hosting

I honestly have never done reseller hosting because they have the same CPU usage and Inode(file) limits as shared hosting so whats the point of paying $25 for Reseller hosting when I could have 3 shared hosting accounts spread across 3 different shared servers/IP’s where each shared hosting plan has its own CPU limits. For autoblogging with lots of sites I would rather just have 3 shared accounts for the same cost as 1 reseller account. I would blow up a reseller account too fast.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

I spent some time reading reviews on VPS and from people I know that run some memory intensive autoblogging software, Liquid Web and ServInt are good for support. I ended up though going with Future Hosting because they offered more for the money and have good reputation also.

Configuring a VPS takes more hands on approach managing the account than shared and future hosting has been decent if you have some knowledge with WHM and setting up a nameserver, but for a newbie they don’t have phone support so you have to just deal with email back and forth.

They are pretty responsive though and I would recommend them. The other VPS I have heard good things about but haven’t used are KnownHost and WiredTree.

If you are new to hosting or coming from dealing with bad “cheap” shared hosting, go with Hostgator. Realize when you google “Best Shared Hosting” or “Hosting Review” or “Worst Hosting” that all those search results sites are affiliate sites that are just pushing hosts with the best payouts. For example many push Just Host/Super Green. I know of at least 20 people who had to dump Super Green and Just Host because their servers were down a lot, pages would time out, and support was horrible(overseas) . I had 2 Super Green Accounts and dumped them after only 3 weeks because I had multiple days of their servers being down. It was awful(in fact when you cancel they offer you a entire free year of hosting to stay with them and I still canceled). In fact I have seen entire forum threads full of people complaining about Super Green.

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