[nylug-talk] Age old question, an acceptable Linux web hosting service.

[Gary Mort]

sixtyfourbeets wrote:
> The criteria I'm judging by is a little bit more than uptime, disk space and (for me fairly important) price.
>   

I like Futurequest, but they have some severe drawbacks.

Diskspace and price suck compared to other companies.  But they don't 
oversell their servers.  All their systems are linux as far as I know.

Support is great, but there is no "live" support and no phone number to 
call.  They are based in Florida and have weathered 2 hurricane induced 
power outages to the area with no downtime.

I've rarely had a support ticket take more than 3 minutes from 
submission through the online form.

The most common support ticket I have is to unlock my ip address from 
SSH access to my account, as they lock the IP after 3 bad logon attempts.

The only recent downside I had was that their provided DNS service 
was/is poorly configured with all 3 DNS servers sitting on their 
internal network - so when 1 of their 3 Internet connections went flaky, 
DNS stopped resolving untill the network connections got switched over 
to the other 2 links and all the routing updates propogated.

There is/was some plan to setup an external DNS site - though you can 
just use your own DNS service elsewhere(though if your using their MX 
servers, you could still run into trouble getting email if their DNS is out)

Don't get me wrong, outages are very very rare.  The biggest problem 
they have faced comes from AOL/HOTMAIL/etc aggressively spam filtering, 
since all outgoing mail goes through the same servers, if one client has 
a poorly designed form system(or even worse, was forwarding all of his 
mail to his AOL account) they can get all of them blocked.  They do 
follow up aggressively, which can mean that if your the guilty party 
your email will be delayed to one of the big hosts untill you can clean 
up whatever imaginary problem they have with you.

-Gary