Quick Shout Out To IMountain.com
Sep 8, 2008
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.
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Aug 3, 2007
I recently changed providers after a short search, including input from this thread [url].
I opted to go with a semi-dedicated package from Iron Mountain ( www.imountain.com ). I was mostly impressed with their clustered solution and dedicated mySQL servers to host our increasingly busy Vbulletin forums. They also answered email inquires very quickly; another good sign, given the few comments I could find about them at WHT.
While I was intrigued about the solar-powered claim, I knew that many in our community would appreciate that aspect as well.
Ultimately, I wasn't quite convinced our forum issues were mainly related to CPU/memory resource use. So, I narrowed my search to providers that also claimed to have a good setup for SQL. These included Cartika Hosting and MediaLayer, among others (Thank you to all who responded with input and offers!). At that point, it came down to lowest price and iMountain's offer was also in the upper end of the price range supported by recent member donations. In case I was wrong about the CPU resources, at least this would at least allow some time to save for the dedicated solution that many recommended.
As it turns out, the CPU/memory resources were not the issue at all. It seems that our forum issues at the previous provider were primarily due to their SQL implementation.
In fact, they were going to generously allow us to continue on our $50/year plan for a while given that we weren't yet hogging resources. Nonetheless, the slowdowns and SQL errors continued until the last day. In any case, I can still recommend AddAction.net for anyone looking for a competitively priced basic hosting package if you don't have major SQL requirements. It was inexpensive, but I believe I got a lot more than I paid for.
Since the switch, the forums have been running great. No slowdowns, no freezes, no infinite waits to read/make a post, no flood of SQL error email messages. Most importantly, no user complaints so far. In addition, I've been told that we aren't even putting a scratch in our resource allocations in any area and there should be plenty of room for growth that has been doubling about every 6 months for the last few years.
The transfer was quick and the switchover had minimal downtime given that the new plan included a dedicated IP address for me to direct users of the forums during the DNS propagation. There were a couple minor issues during the switch, but their tech support team responded very quickly. They also helped setup a memcache for the forums and suggested some other tweaks to further improve performance.
Overall, I am very satisfied so far. I'll report again in a couple months when I have a better feel for downtime and more time for users to comment.
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Jan 9, 2007
I`ve read this about allowing certain IPs access to the server
Quote:
More advanced: /etc/apf/allow_hosts.rules
10. As a safety precaution, you might want to add your ip to the '/etc/apf/allow_hosts.rules' file.
Open the file in your favorite editor.
11. Add the ip of your computer to the end of the file. This will cause all traffic to and from that ip not to be filtered. You can also add the ip's of other servers.
If you want to specify what kind of traffic to allow from those ips that is not covered with the current firewall rules (ie. you blocked all traffic to SSH and only want a few ips to be able to access the SSH port), then this is the format you would use:
Protocol : direction/flow : source/destination port : s/d ip
[tcp/udp] : [in/out] : [s=/d=]PORT : [s=/d=]IP
Ex (let the ip 192.168.0.100 access to port 22):
tcp:in:d=22: s=192.168.0.100
What I`d like to know is if its possible to put an IP range in there instead of just one ip address
such as you specify a range in the conf.apf file upon setup
eg:
tcp:in:d=99_123: s=192.168.0.100
where 99_123 is the port range
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Jul 21, 2007
I am building a server using two Clovertown E5320 processors for a project. I need some suggestions for a motherboard and memory. I have looked at some boards on Newegg, but I'm still unsure. I do not have a large budget for the motherboard, so the cheaper, the better.
If anyone has other processors they would go with alternatively I'm open to suggestions there as well. It was either going to be a single Clovertown (later to be two) or two AMD Opteron 2212's....
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Oct 5, 2009
I find it worrying when new or relatively new users post "[XYZ]VPS PROVIDER IS A SCAM" or "[XYZ]VPS ROBBED ME" in a topic because they didn't get the instant ticket response or fast enough setup time on their $10 VPS..
I'm planning on setting up a budget UK based VPS service myself some time soon, and users would do well to remember that a lot of hard work goes in to the management and set up of such providers. This kind of negative publicity can not be taken back once posted. A quick google search will throw this kind of a post up and cause irrepairable and often, completely unnecessary harm to a business..
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Aug 1, 2009
Quick IPTables Commands
List: iptables -L -n | grep <IP Address>
Remove: iptables -D INPUT -s <IP 1> -d <IP 2> -j DROP
Insert: iptables -I INPUT -s <IP> -j DROP
Flush: iptables -F
Remove: iptables -D OUTPUT -s 0.0.0.0/0 -d 66.93.33.185 -j DROP
netstat -nap | grep :80 | wc –l (shows # of connections to HTTP)
netstat -ntu | awk '{print $5}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort –n (shows total connections per IP, if more than 100 block)
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Jun 6, 2008
I currently switched from XXX to infinitie.net vps service. I was tired of foreign help dealing with people with poor english. Tech support has been very good, and good response times. Servers themselves have good performance. Not the fastest, but the mysql performance has been very good. It's also nice to have a VPS but setup and stuff can be somewhat intimidating. They were very helpful, but I did opt to pay them a small fee to do it for me. The hourly rates aren't a bargain, but when you factor in the time you would need to do it right, if you are just so-so at it, then it was probably worth it.
So far it's only a week, but it's been a happy week. No downtime at all so far. I'll report to you in a month and tell you how things are going.
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Aug 23, 2007
We've recently decided to move a sizable web project to a VPS located at bigvps.com (colo4jax). Although I had some initial concerns about them being single homed to Cogent, I have actually been pleasantly surprised at the speeds of the network. I have seen some very good speeds to some of my key servers located on the West Coast and even better on the East Coast (expected). For grins, we even tested a proprietary voip software between the datacenter (It's in Jacksonville) to one of our offices in San Francisco. It was perfect!
The hardware seems solid and support has been quick to respond to any inquiries.
Although we havent moved over the web project yet, the work we have done on the server has been no problem at all. We expect that when we move over the web project, the VPS will continue to hum along.
As with all providers, it's been a short life with them thus far - I'll post back in a few months and let you know how things progress.
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Aug 7, 2008
I'm a non-techie trying to choose a dedicated hoster. From searching through reviews and prices, I've come down to Lunar Pages or Liquid Web. Would you please give me your opinions of these two, and if there are others that you feel strongly about instead, mention those as well? I would really appreciate it -- I'm very anxious about choosing a reliable company with good service, b/c I'll pretty much be at their mercy! (Life is hard for the non-technical
My programmer gave me these requirements: managed hosting, windows server 2003 or 2008, web edition, 2 GB ram, ms sql server 2005 or above, quad core processor from 1.8 - 2.4 ghz, firewall, automatic backup -- 10 GB, remote desktop connection.
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Feb 26, 2009
I've been a long time reader but I figured I would finally sign up for an account and post a review of my current VPS host, WingSix.com.
Ratings range: 0-10
0 being the worse and 10 being the best
Uptime: 7/10
The uptime has been pretty good. Over the course of six months I had about 1 hour of downtime due to a hardware failure but over the last month I have had nearly 20 hours of downtime due to unexplained outages and migration issues.
Support: 4/10
The support has been horrendous. My average response to tickets is measured in days, if they respond at all, and I still have tickets opened from when I initially ordered the account relating to creeping file corruption which support just dances around. I have also had my IPs changed and server moved twice in the last month with little to no advance notice. Usually nothing actually gets done until I call them and even then it's a crapshoot.
Performance: 9/10
The performance on the server is excellent. The server is primarily a DNS and Mail host for my domains and, so far, I have had no problems with the speed or responsiveness of the service. Take this rating with a grain of salt, however, because I have never done much that would put an incredible load on the server.
Price: 8/10
Their pricing is fairly competitive with other hosts I have looked at. I am currently on their VPS Hawk plan ($25/mo) which offers:
2 dedicated IPs
15 GB storage
400k inodes
100 GB bandwidth
256 MB RAM / 1GB burstable
CPanel
Conclusion
While the uptime, price and performance are good I am hesitant on recommending them to anyone based on my experience thus far with their support
My domain has been reported to the mods.
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Nov 7, 2008
server intrusion: quick fixes
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Dec 1, 2008
I another thread recently I done a 5 year review for another provider hover circumstance changed and I took on a couple of Gigenet servers ( relatively high end)
Sales were extremely efficient working with me to achieve what I needed at a price I was comfortable with, replies were fast and concise so I ended up with 2 new machines and backup service.
Normally I don't need a lot of support and for the first few weeks nothing bar rDNS set ups - However I ran into some serious post migration issues over the past few days that had me stumped, support has been some of the best I have ever received both in speed and efficiency -
Anyway I sincerely hope I will be coming back to this thread in 5 years time to update it.
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Jan 8, 2007
There's a new Wordpress out, so it's a good time to make sure you have any/all wordpress installs updated.
Running this will find versions for every one installed in /home/
Code:
find /home/ -type d -name wp-includes -exec grep -H wp_version {}/version.php ;
The latest version is now 2.0.6
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Oct 1, 2009
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
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Feb 6, 2009
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.
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Aug 3, 2008
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.
my site is [url]
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Jan 20, 2015
I need a quicker way to find spammers. I've found a decent way to find the scripts, but I want to find heavy offenders by a simple command line or something to identify all scripts sending e-mail in let's say a text document or something.
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Apr 3, 2009
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.
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Jan 30, 2009
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.
Other than that, not much to write home about.
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Mar 28, 2009
[Reposted]
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.
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Feb 22, 2009
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.
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Apr 10, 2008
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.
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Aug 9, 2008
i,m sad that at the end i did leave imountain.com
and left my server with them
but with the time my biz is growing like crazy and the server i was using with imountain.com is not powerful to handle that growth .
let me just tell you my story
i rent the server coz they have a crazy offer here
first i did not know them well but with the time and my tickets and my emails
everything is clear like crystal that they are a professional company
they know what they are doing .
i,m not a professional to keep my server unmanaged so they did manged it for me
they have always respond to my tickets and emails less than 15 minutes that,s crazy i know but they are really very fast support i have ever seen .
and i also lean from them i always asked them when they finished fixing my problems what did you do to fix that and they always answered me
i really have felling for that company and i well come back to them when they have a crazy offer for powerful server quad cores
many thanks to theres support and staff you rocks imountain.com
i,m now with LSN and manged by webbycart.com/management.htm
webbycart.com/management.htm
i,m with them less than 1 month but really like them very fast respond
thank to tisha from webbycart.com
if you need more info just pm
imountain.com
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Sep 25, 2008
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
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Apr 6, 2008
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.
Anyway, on to 1 year (hopefully)!
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Jun 16, 2008
I have been with iMountain.com for 8 months now and I wanted to give a quick followup on my progress with them.
Personally I can't say anything bad about these guys. They are truly a top notch operation on all levels. I started my busy American Idol blog out on a shared account and moved on to their managed luxury cluster in February and all I can say is wow. They propelled my blog through the entire season of Idol with little in the way of issues. Because of there service, help and expertise I was able to sustain 700 concurrent connections when David Cook was crowned the winner of season 7.
Uptime - there have been a couple of issues over the months, both of the big ones were discussed here but all outages were handled with great professionalism. Timely emails with updates were sent out and the problems were fixed with little downtime. The latest mysql outage didn't affect me since I have a dedicated mysql server. I did have a fairly serious DDoS attack over a period of 5 days that affected downtime but I was moved to a different server when all other options failed.
Support - These guys are fabulous. They have went above the call of duty at all hours of the day and night answering all of my requests for help. Believe me there have been a lot of support tickets. Mind you 99% of these were just for help on something and not really related to a problem with my hosting account that affected service. (Stating that so people don't think there is an issue with the hosting at iMountain)
Not to mention these guys are great at helping with 3rd party products. How many other support companies will attempt to help you with an issue with your wordpress or gallery install? None that I have ever had. I give them a huge thanks for all of that.
Price - You get what you pay for. iMountain may be a little more expensive with their shared and luxury clusters than some of those oversellers out there but you are getting a great service with these guys. Searching the forums will also find you some discounts you can apply to save a little money.
There is actually so much more I could say about these guys but I think from this review and the other ones floating around the forums that you get the idea that these guys mean business.
honestly I have tried various other hosting options in the past few Idol season from shared at surpass, dedicated at surpass and whatever you call mosso but I have found my home till the day my blog is taken offline. I truly won't be able to find anyone as dedicated to me and my blog as the fellows at iMountain. They take great pride in their service and for that I am truly thankful.
link is in my signature for verification that I am hosted on iMountain.
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Jul 2, 2008
I forgot to write a 10 month review so here is my (almost) 11 month review.
GOOD: Support continues to be as fast as ever. I received a reply to one of my tickets the other day in under a minute. Must be a record. Also, the servers continue to fly along at lightning speed, as does their internet connection.
BAD: Only downtime since my last review occurred when their mySQL cluster server borked on June 1st and crashed. Other than that, mostly everything has been doing pretty good.
RECOMMENDATION: Solar power rules. Support is fast, efficient, and friendly. The servers are mostly reliable; but the hSphere panel can be a bit cumbersome for newcomers. Overall, I give iMountain a 9.9 / 10, or an A+ rating.
Next month I will write a better review as on August 5th will be my 1 year anniversary with them (a first with any host with me! )
Site for review: [url]
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May 7, 2008
I haven't got time to spend forever comparing hosts, so i had a quick look around and saw good things said about imountain and medialayer.
I bought a wordpress blog which is currently doing 75k uniques per month (probably not much in the scheme of things). I am aim to buy or build several more blogs of this size plus a couple of ecommerce stores.
I think as per 1 good review i saw of imountain, that either host would probably do, but can anyone offer some advice of if speed is significantly different between either of them or if there is any other reason i might be swayed either way?
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Oct 31, 2007
I needed more control over my aplications (needed SSH, eaccelerator) and I upgraded from their Solar Cluster 3 to their 512RAM emeraldVPS.
Let me tell you the setup that these guys have rules in every way.
The only thing that runs on the VPS is Apache so you might have an idea that this may perform better in some aplications than most 1GB RAM dedicated servers that also run MySQL, mail and other services ...at a fraction of the price. MySQL, mail and dns runs on their clusters. I installed zend and eaccelerator, and now my busy Romanian blog (with wpcache) runs in 82MB RAM
I'm going to move 90% of my sites there, I have lots of space and resources to grow.
According to cpuinfo I also benefit from 8 of these:
CPU model name:
Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 865
The support guys have always been fair and square to me, they answered fast to all my questions (mostly less than 10 minutes), moved my sites on the VPS and told me what's good and what's not so good about their VPS (yes, they told me without asking them about the minor "inconvenience" I may have with the VPS before I bought it). I feel they are the kind of guys you would love going to parties and drinking beer with.
Random screenshot of htop: [url]
I don't know what more to say
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Oct 17, 2007
In recent months i was jumping from one vps
to another vps benchmarking and at the same time testing webpages response using webmin.
And, my conclusion is that imountain.com H-Sphere vps has the fastest webpages updates
under the load, even when processor cpu usage is at 80%.
Hmm, how do they do it.
Needless to say i am staying put with them.
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