FutureQuest Overview

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FutureQuest’s website is poorly designed, but if you manage to look past that, you could find a really solid hosting service that knows how to craft plans that meet the needs of primarily businesses but provides enough of an a la carte menu that allows users to build the plan that is best for them and their tailored requirements. In fact, that seems to be FutureQuest’s thing: building individual plans to meet different needs.

Ease of Use

Getting past the website, it’s pretty easy to use most of their servers. There honestly isn’t much to actually access them, which is something noteworthy as a lot of servers have complex systems in place that are designed to make them more secure but also make them more difficult. In this case, security comes without irritating the customer, which is a welcomed change. That being said, integration can get a little tricky. It’s not a very intuitive process to get your local data working with your server and will probably require some work with customer service in order to get it working. This isn’t very difficult, but it’s harder than a lot of other services out there.

Features

In order to understand FutureQuest, it’s best not to think of the company as providing a number of individual services so much as a series of packages that include all the services that they host with options to add as necessary.

The basic plan, dubbed “Visionary,” starts the user out with 1.5 gigs of storage space, which isn’t too bad for a basic plan, but really becomes surprising when you realize you also get 50 gigs of bandwidth for the month, which is spectacular to start. It also comes with a dedicated IP, five FTP accounts, 15 POP/IMAP accounts for email, several tools, a URL and quite a bit else.

The top unmanaged server is the High Capacity, which is five levels of upgrade higher than the Visionary and leaves you with 10 gigs of storage, 250 gigs of transfer, 40 FTP accounts, 40 MySQL databases, 300 POP/IMAP accounts, and even more tools than the other plans. This will cover the needs of most small businesses and certainly be overkill for personal use.

There is also the Managed QuestServer at $179.00 a month, which starts to push into the area that it’s far too big and expensive to be useful. I’m sure that having the server managed is nice, but ultimately this is about $50 too much a month for an increase to 30 gigs storage, 400 gigs bandwidth, and a few other big numbers that aren’t worth nearly $100 more.

On top of all of that, it’s possible to buy additional data, bandwidth, email addresses, IP addresses, domain names, and any other small aspect of these plans for a reduced cost, so you can build the plan that works best for you very easily.

Customer Support

Support is nothing particularly impressive, but it is certainly satisfactory. You can search FutureQuest’s online database of information, which is well put together and has useful articles for most questions. The search function works well and helps users find what they are looking for quickly. Otherwise, you can submit a problem ticket to get support for your issue. You should find the support staff very helpful and professional.

Pricing

Pricing is pretty well scaled until the very end. As previously mentioned, FutureQuest has a series of packages that include everything it offers to one extent or another with the option to buy more of the pieces, so pricing depends largely on what you’re looking to get.One thing that should be said is that buying a package is always cheaper than buying an add-on, and while the option is there, it’s usually best just to go up a level.

The Visionary package is only $8.95 a month, which is incredibly low considering everything that comes with it. The Pioneer pack jumps to $16.95 a month, but adds another gig of storage, 20 more of bandwidth, twice as many FTP accounts and POP/IMAP servers, and quite a few other bonuses, making this one even more worthwhile. You continue to go up with less spectacular increases in stats through Prospector ($24.95), Trailblazer ($33.95), Voyager ($41.95), and Odyssey at $49.95 until you hit High Capacity, again described above for $85 a month. They’re all at least worth what you get; though, avoid the Managed QuestServer, which is overpriced.

The Good

For the most part, the packages that FutureQuest sets up are excellent

Plans uniquely offer a lot of value for the money requested

The Bad

Integrating the hosting service with your own local data is a bit confusing, and having to fix it through email can be difficult

The Ugly

The Managed QuestServer plan is far too expensive for what is being provided