I've been with imountain.com for a full year now. When I first started with them, I liked them a lot. Now I like them even more.
A brief example. There was some confusion on my billing, probably mine moreso than theirs. Here is part of the message I got from support.
"First of all, we would never shutdown your VPS without letting you know way ahead of time so don’t worry about that."
I've had my hosting account with Iron Mountain fairly happily for around a year or so now ... it seems though that recently things are headed downhill.
Support requests get answered - eventually. I had sites down and very slow yet again today (lately seems like a common occurrence), and a ticket submitted about six hours ago now has as of yet gone unacknowledged.
I've gotten used to endless FTP timeouts and generally spotty speeds, but it's definitely gotten worse... to the point where I might have to go shop for a new provider.
Having some clients on Iron Mountain hosting who I depend on to make my living, this is just a little to risky!
Caveat: I do have a shared plan, and it's definitely quite inexpensive. So, this could just be a get-what-you-pay-for scenario. Regardless though, in my more recent experience, they are helpful and generally nice to deal with. But neither service speed nor hosting service quality are particularly great.
In my whole entire lifetime I thought that I would never do a 1 year review on a host, ever. Each time I signed up with a host; something came up - whether it was needing more diskspace or bandwidth, excessive server downtime, getting "you did x thing and you must leave" notices, or just wanting something closer to home - that is, until I found Brandon and crew at iMountain.com.
The stay from 8/5/2007 to 8/5/2008 has been nothing but pleasurable and enjoyable. While there have been some bumps along the way (UPS explosions, ISP !@#$ ups, etc.); this has been by far the best host that I have ever used.
Their servers are very fast and reliable. With 8 core AMD Opteron CPU's powering their web servers to a whopping 16 core AMD Opteron CPU setup for the mySQL server cluster; you never have to worry about server lag. And if by chance the server should bog down, just shoot em an email and it's always resolved within minutes.
Need a custom backup cronjob? They do those. Just be sure you know how to use Crapsphere ... cough, erm I mean Hsphere, as that is the only control panel that they use on their shared hosting servers. You can get cPanel and other control panels on dedicated servers from iMountain, however.
The good thing about iMountain's clustered setup is that if one server goes down, it won't affect your entire site. So if the email server crashes; your web and mySQL will still be up. So on and so forth.
Just load up one of my main sites at [url]to see how fast iMountain.com is. I think you will be very impressed.
Brand new to posting on this forum, but been browsing for a while. Also brand new to VPS, but i recently decided to take my first plunge into the VPS world. I've been using Iron Mountain VPS for about 3 weeks now, and since there seems to be very little talk about their services on this forum, I thought it would be useful to post my opinions, and maybe get the opinions of some others about this provider.
My Background:
I began my search for web hosting because I had been hosting my own email server at home, but began to have several issues keeping the server up and running (power outages, network outages, power supply failures, etc...). My wife was complaining about her email being down, so I began looking for a more reliable solution I'm also a software developer, so I also had some interest in running some "hobby" type j2EE programs, so I began to look at VPS solutions. Since I am pretty technically inclined, I was just looking for a low cost unmanaged VPS solution with at least reasonable reliability that was powerful enough to run j2ee applications, host email, and run a couple other services like hosting my digital photos and setting up a versioning control repository (svn). I actually took the time to make a speadsheet to compare over 10 VPS providers, and eventually found Iron Mountain to be the best solution for me.
Setup:
Their sales department was VERY quick to answer my questions, and very accomodating to my requests. I purchased their Pearl package online, and once the transaction was complete, I recieved an email that I could already log into my control panel. Here is the timline that things happened:
11:35am - Purchase transaction complete
11:36am - Recieve email on my billing info, and how to get into my VPS control panel.
11:48am - Recieved email that my VPS has been initialized, and I can no SSH to my instance
12:22pm - Recieve email that they have already setup a MySQL database for me (on their servers), and it is ready to use (without me even asking mind you).
4:31pm - I send an email (not even a support ticket) saying that I actaully prefer PostgresSQL
4:40pm - Recieve email that they will setup a Postgres instance for me
5:34pm - My PostgresSQL instance is up and ready to go (on their servers!)
So in summary, that is 13 minutes from purchase to having my instance up and running. 34 minutes additional to have a database ready for me to use (without me even asking for one). And another hour of time it took them to get a Postgres instance up for me... Not bad
Perfromance/Reliability:
Let me preface this by saying that I am a father of 2 with a full-time job, so I really don't have time to run benchmarks and such. Also, my VPS is more of a personal site, so I don't have to worry about reliability as much as say a reseller or ecommerce customer. So I'm only basing these comments on preception and my knowledge of the technology Iron Mountain uses. In genereal, I have experienced NO downtime, and performance seems VERY quick. My J2EE application almost seems to run faster off these servers than it does on my localhost development environment... which is good enough for me.
Now let me rant about why I am very comfortable with their ability to continue to have great perfromance and reliability. One key here is that this is clustered web hosting! This means they have (for example) 30 servers working together like 1 giant computer. This giant computer runs all of their customer's VPS instances. If one server were to fail, nobody is losing service, it just means that there are now only 29 servers making up this one giant computer until they can get #30 back up and running. This not only protects us customers against one possible cause of downtime, but it also allows Iron Mountain to do server maintanence and upgrades without interupting any of their customer's service. My employeer has a similar setup in their datacenter, so I am semi-knowledgable on the benefits of a cluster. Now their service could still go down because of things like network issues (which is often out of the control of the VPS provider), but at least it removes risk at one point of failure. If you need anything more reliable than this, you should consider other alternatives such as having a mirrored service with another VPS provider on a completely different network.
Another HUGE selling point for me is that they host my databases, email, and spam filters (and DNS if you need to use it) on THIER servers! All three of these can potentially hog system resources (disk space, memmory, and bandwidth), so to not have them taxing my personal instance is HUGE. This also spares me from having to configure and maintain these services on my own. Oh, and to top it off, the perfomance of these services are VERY fast. However, the flexibiblity is there if you decide you want to host your own database and email on your own servers (obviously).
Support:
As I mentioned earlier, I only really needed an unmanaged provider, and I haven't experienced any issues to this point, so my opinion on their support is limited. However, I have sent about 5-7 emails their way, and have received a response from them within 10 minutes every time! This gives me quite a bit of comfort should a real issue arise.
The funny part of all this is that I can not tell whether Iron Mountain's plans are managed or unmanaged. I guess they are at least semi-managed, as they have setup a database for me without any questions. I guess my question is whether they are fully managed (ie will do backups and install custom apps for you) or not... Maybe an Iron Mountain rep can chime in here.
Summary:
VERY smooth sailing so far. I have email, databases, subversion, apache, tomcat and more running, and still have plenty of resources left over for more. Sales/Support has been VERY friendly, and I have no concerns their. For what I need out of a VPS, who could ask for more. Their prices are also very reasonable, and their new Quartz plan is an amazing deal for a hobbyist like myself. Not really much to critisize at this point, but I will keep this forum up to date if anything arises.
it would appear that Iron Mountain ( www.ironmountain.com ) has filed a trademark infringement suit against InterMountain Mortgage also known as Iron Mountain Hosting ( www.imountain.com ) regarding the use of "Iron Mountain" and various colors and service marks.
I don't think this will come as a surprise to many people given how similar these two names are, along with the fact that Iron Mountain have been involved in IT well before InterMountain Mortgage decided to take the plunge into hosting.
It's going to be an interesting trial by jury to say the least...
Reference:
[url]
Basically I need to virtualize a single new dell server. One virtual server needs to run windows 2003 server standard and Microsoft SQL 2005. The other virtual server will run CentOS Linux with a perl and PostgreSQL application.
The dell server is going to have two quad core xeon processors (8 cores total), 8gigs of ram, and two 15,000rpm SAS drives.
I came across Virutal Iron which is free for the single server instance and seems like it will do the job well. Has anybody used it? What is performance like? Seems to run a Java backend so wondering about the performance there.
Any other recommendations? I looked at VMware but the cost is so high, and probably more then I need, since I only need to virtualize a single server.
Can anyone recommend a dedicated server provider that will allow us to setup a virtual iron cluster.
View 1 Replies View RelatedA company i am working with is looking to install a VMWare setup comprising of something like this :
6x Dual Proc Quad Core Nodes with 16GB RAM
2x Clustered iSCSN SAN Nodes
I am intending on purchasing the full suite including DRS/HA/VMotion.
Now this is all well and good but the software pricing is absolutely horrendous! So my question to you chaps is :
Is anyone using the latest Virtual Iron or Xen Enterprise in a high end environment?
Obviously VMWare is the market leader, the big boys are using it and its something you can bank on. (literally! HSBC use it ALOT!)
Is it even worth looking at VI/Xen for something like this? The cost would be like a quarter of the total cost of a VMWare license.