Future Spirits was founded in 1996 as an IT solutions company that provides web hosting, website development, marketing solutions, and global IT services. Its web hosting service includes shared server hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server hosting. The company has a data center located in Kyoto, Japan, and its website is available in Japanese and English.
Features and Ease of Use
Future Spirits’ shared server hosting is known as Future Web 3 and its on a different domain name. It has an entry plan, a standard plan, and a premium plan. These three plans offer the following features:
- Free SSL certificates
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Anywhere from 50GB to 400GB storage space
- Daily/weekly/monthly automatic backups
It’s two higher plans support 10 MySQL databases and unlimited FTP accounts. You can also host up to 20 websites and an unlimited number of email addresses.
For easy creation of websites, each plan is equipped with Web Presence Builder, a website creation tool with over 100 design templates. It also provides a WordPress toolkit that customers can use to manage WordPress from the control panel. Experienced webmasters can program in PHP and Perl. It supports a good number of PHP versions.
Each plan comes with a Plesk control panel and from here, you can easily install SSL certificates for free. Free SSL is a great incentive for customers because of security and SEO benefits.
Future web 3 comes with IPS + WAF added to its firewall, which blocks many types of cyber attacks and doesn’t need to be installed or managed.
It utilizes the RAID 10 disk array, which uses multiple hard disk drives to enhance speed and reliability so that if a disk fails, your data isn’t lost.
It is important to note that Future Spirits does not provide any uptime guarantee, which could be a gripe for many, as it was for me.
Pricing and Support
The entry plan, standard plan, and premium plan from Future web 3 have a monthly and yearly subscription offer. A discount is given, but only if you choose the yearly plan. The prices aren’t the lowest available for the features on offer when compared to what other hosting providers offer, but they aren’t extremely expensive.
While there is no money-back guarantee, Future Spirits does counter that with two weeks of free trial on all plans, so you can test the services first before putting any of your money forward. You can also purchase additional disk space, databases, and mailing list if you require more than what these three plans can offer.
Payment options include credit cards, bank transfer, and PayPal, and after purchasing a plan, your server will be set up within one to three business days. If you choose to switch from another hosting company to Future Spirits, migration will be done within two to three weeks. It also offers VPS, but setup can take up to three business days.
Its support is available only in Japanese and it comes in the form of ticket, email, knowledge base, and telephone support. The response time for an inquiry is from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM on weekdays and any inquiry sent outside of business hours will be responded to by the next business day.
I emailed them over the weekend and received a prompt response on the following business day. However, I had to translate the response to English by myself.
