Iron Mountain Hosting (imountain) Involved In Trademark Infringement Case
Mar 27, 2008
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...
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.
I'm reeling right now after my shared hosting has been down for more than 24 hours (and this isn't one of the super-cheapies, it's in the $20-$30/month range)
In the future I'd really like to be protected against this kind of outage... I know downtime is inevitable with any host, so I'm wondering if it's possible to have some kind of failover system. Maybe I could get a second account with a bargain basement host (<$10/month) and keep it relatively up to date with a mirror of my site. But I don't know how I could manage the DNS so it went to the second host in the even of a failure on the first....
Does this kind of redundancy exist as some product in the industry that I don't know about (is that what "colocation" is?)? Is it likely that my host has the ability/willingness to redirect my domain (302 or something) in times of trouble like this?
I've emailed their host about using copyrighted materials, I've discussed it with the owner and now I've ran out of ideas for what to do to stop this guy from stealing my ideas/concepts/coding.
I've had people emailing me and ringing saying that either: I ripped him ... which isn't something I want to be told when my site was out first.
So my question to you is... what's the best way to deal with someone who's:
I did some independent contractor work for a friend starting a new branch of his business from mid-April to mid-July. I should have known better than to trust this "friend" as he is a snake and has not paid me for the work I did beyond the partial month of April. May/June/July bills are due totaling $3800.00 and he will not pay up. The middle of July was the last work I did for him and am no longer doing any of his projects.
As part of start-up and marketing a driver education program I created a website. I paid for the (generic, not associated with his business name) domain name, am the registrant, paid for the hosting, and full control the website. The website design and updating fees are part of the amount due, and I told him I would be happy to give him administrative rights to the website since I already had it up and running.
When he figured out he couldn't sneak behind my back and talk the web host service out of the access info, he was quite ticked off. Out came the gloves and he started a different domain name/website with someone else and they cried "copyright infringement" to the hosting company so my web site would be suspended. QUESTION: When the web host receives a complaint such as this, what is the proper procedure for handling it based on the DMCA and copyright laws? The host's site only has a statement in his policy about what to do if you are a target of copyright infringement. Common sense would tell me (although laws and common sense don't always go together) that as the customer of the hosting company, I should have been notified, given the opportunity to take down whatever they were objecting to, and then show the host that I did take the material off. I need to look into the Intellectual Property aspect of it, but that is not what I'm concerned about at the moment.
What rights do I have as the one getting bushwacked to have my website re-activated? Am I entitled to view all supporting documents? I have opened a support ticket asking why it was suspended 18 days ago, they responded with the emailed complaint (minus supporting documents) from the new web host, and didn't say what I needed to do to remedy the situation.
I intend to clear all of his stuff off my website and use it for another purpose, since I've already paid for the domain name and a year of web hosting.
The next step, after getting this website freed up again will be taking the deadbeat to conciliation/small claims court to collect the amount due with the assistance of an attorney. In our county if you appeal a judgement, it goes to district court and you have to have an attorney. I can see this guy with deep pockets financially beating me up for the fun of it. I can't afford to play that game.
Sorry this got long, but the moral of the story is: Do NOT trust friends who are snakes to others in business dealings...they will be a snake to you, too.
Since I can't get any answers in the technical forum, I figured this one would be my best shot.
I'm looking at using SAN storage for multiple webservers, and I'm slightly confused about something.. if a SAN comes with a controller, doesn't it still need a RAID card (I'm looking at making the SAN robust AND quick)?
I know about the bare-minimum gigabit ethernet/fiber along with how to load most things. It's just the barebones hardware I'm having trouble wrapping my head around.
We were asked by a couple of potential customers for SAS70 certification. Before researching google I though I post this in this forum and see if any body has any idea about what is involved. So specifically here are my question:
1. Is it hard to become SAS70 certified?
2. How much of expense should we be looking at?
3. Are there any companies or outsourced who can help to get it done?
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.
from about 3-4 days, the cpu of my server, from an average of 0-15% load, grew up to a constant 80-90-100% cpu load.
There were two processes called php-cgi.exe IWAM_PLESK(default) that, each one, constantly burned 30-40% of cpu load.
So, stopping websites one by one, I found the website that was the cause of the cpu overload.
On my "old" windows vps, there were processes called with the name of the website hosted (for example websitename_web.exe), so it was easy to immediately find exactly what website was involved in the hypotetical cpu or ram overload issue.
I am one month short of 2 years hosting with the guys at iMountain.com and I couldn't be happier.
My American Idol blog has made the steps from a shared account with them to their semi-dedicated to a single core dedicated to a brand spanking new dual core dedicated server in the past 23 months. Yes the new server is overkill 8 months out of the year but during American Idol I need all the server I can get. Last season saw 1500+ online at one time.
A huge thanks for the server move this past weekend. A fairly transparent move with minor issues that were sorted out quickly. awesome job
Uptime
has been great for me. hyperspin reports 99.87% uptime for my server. Can't complain about that at all considering most downtime recorded is actually server upgrades.
support
This is still imountain's strongest aspect IMO. Their support is very knowledgeable, fast and even will help with 3rd party scripts. The have helped me setup a couple of custom things, always answer my questions with personal responses, not canned messages and always get issues solved. they have been there all hours and have fixed or setup anything I have ever asked for.
They also have phone support which I have used once just to ask them about an issue real quick. For me email support is better.
price
very competitive for what you get. Fast servers, access to a huge house database server even on the cheapest shared accounts. You are not on oversold servers. (trust me, I am running Status2K on a shared account as well and the server load is almost always perfect). Not to mention their support team is worth every penny. I just had a support ticket in to setup email notification to me on any cronjobs and it took them less than 5 minutes to do it and respond. Absolutely amazing.
con's
HSPERE control panel which takes some getting used to. I have it mastered now but when I first signed up I was lost as hell.
what i would like to see
I would love to see a customer forum. At one point they said they were going to install one but at this point nothing has come of it.
Still would like to see support sign the names to support tickets so I know who is who. if the support ticket does have a name it is always imountain.com not the techs name
in closing my hosting experience with iMountain has been the best ever and it gets better and better all the time. If you are in need of great hosting with a good support team give them a try
Just wanted to drop a quick review on my current host iMountain.com since I have been so pleased with them and tonight they really went above the call of duty.
First a little background. Been with iMountain since November 2007 on Shared, Luxury and now Dedicated. I run custom DNS with a rollover solution so if my dedicated server with iMountain goes down, my blog will show a splash page that is hosted on another server.
Tonight for some reason the DNS thought my site was down and it rolled over to the backup server. iMountain staff happened to drop by my blog and noticed I was loading the rollover server and fired me off an email to tell me that something was amiss with my DNS since my server with them was in fact up.
How often would a host email you with a problem? Unless it is to suspend you, not very often I would think.
I give the guys at iMountain 2 thumbs up for going above and beyond the call of duty each and everyday. They truly are a great hosting company. I hope to be with them as long as I am in need of a server.
The only big thing I would like to see different at iMountain is having them install a user forum. most hosts these days have them and iMountain should too.
cant believe its almost been a year already, but like sand through the hour glass so goes the days of our lives. anyway, my almost year with imountain has been one of pure bliss. everyone on the imountain team needs to be commended cause they have consistently been there when i needed them and have truly bent over backwards to answer any remedial question i may pose or fulfill any request without hesitation. their support team is phenomenal and have truly gone above and beyond the call of duty and it has been truly appreciated.
uptime has been excellent. there has been only a few hours of downtime and most of that has been scheduled. even though they had to shut me down last week, but i truly couldnt be mad at them cause they did everything they could to rectify the issue. i run a music blog and some spider/bot was trying to download everything in my directories at one time which of course brought/slowed down the server i am on. i could tell that they hated taking me down, but business is business and i know i was affecting other people's businesses. in the end they tracked down the main offender and everything returned to normal.
in regards to speed, i think my site loads pretty quickly. i have not been told otherwise. people are quick to complain about other stuff and loading times has not been one of their gripes.
all in all i would give them a 9.5 out of 10 and will continue to recommend them to anyone who will listen.
One of my customers asked me if is possible technically to offer free email services.
Since he's going to launch a big portal he want to offer such things later, for all users.
Now, there are problems as: a) if there is any possibility to compress emails similar with GMAIL or YahooMail or so, because i can't imagine the email is uncompressed
b) how can be handled email boxes over multiple (mail ?) servers if the HDD space needed would be larger than for one server HDD ?
Got a question about cases fans but know someone will have a laugh at me about this.
We have recently moved from 1u supermicro cases to matx cases to lower the general server cost. We realised that we wouldnt fill 2/3 of a rack if we used 1u (16 amps power would be hit) and it was just logical to use matx.
One worry is the heat factor so was looking at some powerful fans. The one place I know where to get them from is our dyanatron supplier but I am left very confused. You always see on fans they use 0.3amp/12v (for example) but how much does that work out to be at the final power usage? this goes for the same in watts. Are fans something you have to worry about in the long run or do they make a non exsiting dent into a racks amp usage?
I figured this would be the place to ask this question as the parts Im using are ex-server :-))..
Basically, I've purchased an old dual xeon board with matching xeons and I'm after a case. However the motherboard is EATX, and dosent seem to fit any of my ATX cases.
So, what case should I go for? Im trying to make it a cheap as possible.. Also I live in the UK.
I saw, this case. I figured for that price I cant go wrong. But will it fit an EATX?
well I have been with imountain now since 11/01/07 and they still are by far the best hosting company I have ever been with.
I started on a simple clustered shared plan, moved to their clustered semi-dedicated plan and now am on my own dedicated server (opteron 246 with 4GB of RAM). my server runs a wordpress blog that last wednesday night had 868 concurrent connections and ran as smooth as if there were only 10 concurrent connections. WP-Cache, xCache and memcache (huge server) are utilized as well as offloading images to steadyoffload.com
uptime
There were a couple of issues in the past but nothing major for me. The MYSQL outage didn't affect me as I wasn't on the house database server cluster that went down. there are the occasional issues for a few minutes here and there but nothing major at all.
Hyperspin show my uptime 99.891% since January (there was a large DDOS attack in there).
I can live with that considering I have failover in that if the imountain server goes offline a splash page from another hosting account(In UK) shows up within 3 minutes stating the server is offline and will be back up soon. When imountain comes back online within 3 minutes the splash page is gone and my blog shows again.
support
This is imountain's strongest aspect IMO. Their support is very knowledgeable, fast and even will help with 3rd party scripts. The have helped me setup a couple of custom things, always answer my questions with personal responses, not canned messages and always get issues solved.
They also have phone support which I have used once just to ask them about an issue real quick. For me email support is better.
price
I can't go into this topic much for certain reasons but their prices IMO are competitive.
con's
HSPERE control panel which takes some getting used to. I have it mastered now but when I first signed up I was lost as hell.
what i would like to see
I would love to see a customer forum. At one point they said they were going to install one but at this point nothing has come of it.
If they don't want to do a forum, I would like to see more updates on their blog when issues arise.
Still would like to see support sign the names to support tickets so I know who is who. if the support ticket does have a name it is always imountain.com not the techs name.
I never, ever thought that I would ever have to write an 18 month review of a webhost ... but here I am. That is because, quite simply; I have never stayed with a web hosting company before for over a year, until now.
Technically my 18 month anniversary is February 5th; but since I have been quite busy with other projects; I thought I would use the bit of free time that I do have right now to post the review. So here it is.
- - - - - -
THE GOOD: iMountain is still there (obviously). Their servers remain fast; and so does the network. There was the network outage in late October 2008; and the router failure a couple a week or two ago; but other than that things have been rock solid *knock on wood*. I am lucky to be on a fast server where people rarely; if ever; bog it down.
Also, Brandon and his crew continue to keep up a mostly top notch level of support.
They have been a bit slower than in the past to respond; but I suspect that is because they are getting busier and growing. It comes with the territory, I suppose.
THE BAD: Communication (as noted above) has been a tad worse than in the past. I am not 100% sure if that is their fault or not; but I wish that it could be improved, if possible. But I do appreciate the fact that we got a nice discount off of our next bill for the major network outage that happened in October 2008.
I’ve had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I’ve concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I’ve used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).
Summary Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum
Pre-sales and pricing I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=649322), which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.
Migration Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don’t offer to do the migration for you and I didn’t yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.
Support Support quality is definitely one of iMountain’s strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It’s all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I’ve experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They’re also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it’s worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There’s no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There’s a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they’re barely used.
Speed Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I’ve only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they’ve all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "…we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we’re here to make sure your visitors get through…". So far I haven’t tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].
Reliability I’ve been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year [url] and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I’m a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I’m still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host.
Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.
File permission issues Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can’t subsequently be modified or removed by it. It’s a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It’s all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.
An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it’s no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.
Certificates I found that iMountain’s security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven’t encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you’re planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I’ve simply gone back to unencrypted connections.
E-Mail Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I’ve had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail.
There’s no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.
Control panel The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don’t work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.
Backups There’s no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).
Solar power The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.
I've had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I've concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I've used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).
Summary Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum Pre-sales and pricing I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see [url] [url],which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.
Migration Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don't offer to do the migration for you and I didn't yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.
Support Support quality is definitely one of iMountain's strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It's all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I've experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They're also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it's worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There's no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There's a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they're barely used.
Speed Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I've only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they've all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "...we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we're here to make sure your visitors get through...". So far I haven't tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].
Reliability I've been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year [url] and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I'm a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I'm still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host. Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.
File permission issues Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can't subsequently be modified or removed by it. It's a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It's all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.
An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it's no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.
Certificates I found that iMountain's security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven't encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you're planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I've simply gone back to unencrypted connections.
E-Mail Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I've had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail. There's no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.
Control panel The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don't work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.
Backups There's no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).
Solar power The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.
Feel free to move this post to another place, I couldn't find a place to put webhost reviews. Been running around and am just now getting to my review of them... Its been about 9 months since I got my account at imountain.com and they've been great. I'm always updated on any scheduled downtimes, and even unexpected downtimes (crashes/hardware failure etc.). There has been only one occasion where my site went down during the middle of the day, some user foolishly created a poor SQL statement and it dropped the server. This was fixed within 2 hours and we were back online.
My site only has ~50 users so its low load, other than that one time everyone is happy with it.
Imountain.com's support staff have been more than excellent, they've answered all my questions quickly and with detail. The only downside (for me) is that since I'm not on a VPS I don't have any shell access but its understandable for security reasons so its not a big deal and it was expected on my part.
I'm a fairly technical person, work about 95% of the time in a linux desktop and server environment and am used to having shell access to our servers to do maintenance so the web maintenance was a bit different but easy to use too. All together though, great prices, great service and great support staff. I think I'll be keeping my account at imountain.com and not moving.
I have an account with iMountain since August 2007 and have nothing but good things to say about them.
First, when I signed up I used one of their coupons that were available back then and signed up for solarcluster3.
I also had time to test their VPS for a few months but got back to solarcluster, didn't had too much time to manage the VPS.
Uptime: in one year I had about 3 outages, two small ones and the bigger one that some of you know about when their MySQL cluster crashed (I got compensated for this). We all know downtime is inevitable and I'm very happy on how they managed the issue. Looking forward to another year with this kind of uptime. Over 99.9+ overall.
Support: they are very fast to reply and fix issues, take backups of your account or do some custom php settings / installs. I really feel they are holding my hand here.
I'm currently using 2.3GB of space and in some (good) months I use over 150GB transfer. Sometimes I have over 200 visitors online on my wordpress blogs. All sites load very fast, no load issues etc.
I only signed up to test them out (for 1 month, 1 year ago) but they are just too good and I feel very comfortable with them.
I have my main sites there so I'm looking forward for at least one more year with them.
If there's anything else you guys want to know, just ask
During the past 24 hours, two things have happened with iMountain.com that I wanted to let you all know about.
1. I uncovered a bug in the Webshell application that they use (bundled with Hsphere) which was preventing me from gzipping up my and my buddy's owsweather.com site for weekly backups. Reported it in an email, and in 2 minutes I had a reply back saying that they would notify Hsphere of the issue since it's a bug in the software. Good job there.
2. The big one is that the same owsweather.com site is getting clobbered by HUGE amounts of traffic - more than we ever have in our 8 year history. We have received over 2500 unique IP visits since midnight (it is now 5 minutes until 6:00 am PDT in California).
I must give major props to iMountain for building rock solid servers which don't bog down under high traffic load, and also for allowing us to "use" their servers for what they are INTENDED to be used for! If it wasn't for them and allowing our site to have bursts of traffic like this *see Dreamhost, Bluehost, and other similar reviews*, we would be in a very tight spot indeed. So thanks Brandon and crew. You have done us well.
Didn't write a review last month cause I didn't feel the need to, but I will this month.
Main reason being because I am going on vacation from June 1st to the 5th, and my payments are due on the 5th day of the month. So I call iMountain and Brandon picked up. He was happy to inform me that it would not be a problem if I paid a day or two late so that I could get back from my vacation and get settled first without having to go "omgz I need to feed iMountain!"
Also, I have had absolutely zero downtime in the past 2 months since the mySQL server cluster RAID fault. Now that I said that, they will have downtime. (Joking) Thank god I backup nightly. Anyway, the databases are MUCH faster now since they upgraded the cluster, no complaints there.
The support staff continue to be very helpful (as always), especially the night crew.
Don't usually email / call during the day unless it's to talk to Brandon. Must be since I'm a night owl.
