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.
Just wanted to say a thumbs up to HostechSupport.com for giving me a hand with Drive Warning: /dev/sda3 (/usr) is 84% I had for the past 2 weeks or so.
Surprisingly I had problems in the early get go finding someone to help me clear this up. Initially most were giving me quote of $60 an hour to $37 for half an hour of work. Even my old monthly server management ppl, jonesolutions.com, would only offer to clean it up for me for $60 too.
I had to cancel them 2 months ago because I lost my job and couldn't afford $40/month from them. Not sure why they would think I could afford $60 hourly work fee. So it was nice to find some friendly help and offers when I made this topic:
Been with hostatree for 3 months now and very excited to say how great they are. I have never had to use there support as so far I have had no problems.
My website [url] does use quite a lot of bandwidth and at times can get alot of visitors and I've only heard good things from them about the speed.
I still currently have my old hosting plan as well, but I am in the process of organizing a move all my websites to hostatree.
Good price, very reliable. I was one of the earlier people to sign up so I got a very good hosting deal with one of the coupons.
Just wanted to take a minute and write up a review for CorporateColo.com (they certainly deserve it )
NETWORK: 10/10 - Fantastic bandwidth, haven't had a single network issue yet
SUPPORT: 15/10 - The support staff would probably be my favorite aspect of CorpColo. They're all awesome, dedicated people who actually care - something you really don't find every day in this industry. Victor, Jon, & Dima really go out of the way to make sure that customers are satisfied.
PRICING: 10/10 - They have some amazing rates and were able to offer me a great deal based on my specific requirements.
BUILDING: 10/10 - DRT is undoubtedly one of the most secure buildings in Los Angeles and CorpColo's suites absolutely reflect this. The policies and structure of the building take away all of the worry, and I have, personally, always felt that my and my customer's data was always safe.
They're really an A++ in my book; I hope to do business with them for a long time!
Initially, I was looking for a VPS to host my anime video streaming site. Then, I came across DotXM Hosting website through Hamza's MSN personal message.
I spoke to Hamza about my plans to host an anime video streaming website and asked him plenty of questions in which he answered all of them honestly and professionally.
I asked Hamza if I could start with the shared hosting plan. He said yes. After realizing that I could save alot instead of getting VPS, I decided to give DotXM a shot.
DotXM techs and support team were very efficient. They got my whole PHPmotion installed and working in just one day and for a very cheap and affordable fee!
Till today, my website runs so smoothly despite being on a shared hosting plan. Who says you need a VPS to kickstart a proper video streaming website? ^^
Thank you for DotXM and Hamza and his team for his support, understanding and professional attitude in serving customers.
In short, DotXM is a quality hosting with great value.
Tech Support: 5/5 Customer Support: 5/5 Reliability and uptime: 5/5 Space: 4gb Bandwith: 40 gb Price: $3.95! (Old Plan before DotXM Re-did everything a few days ago) Domain: [url]
Although I only ordered my VPS a couple of days ago I felt compelled to make known my initial thoughts on cheapvps.co.uk.
My main reasons for going for cheapvps was not only the cheap prices, but also the fact that a2b2 (a sister company of cheapvps I believe) and Rus appear to have very good reps here on WHT. I spoke to Rus initially via live help to ask a couple of questions and he was extremely helpful which convinced me to make my mind up there and then.
The VPS was set up and going within about 3 hours which is very fast in my book (I didn't get access to it for a couple of hours more but that was just because of an e-mail hiccup causing me not to receive the welcome e-mail). The speed is amazing - especially for a budget VPS. The network is also extremely fast, and the fact I got the choice of it being in the UK was also a big bonus for me.
One of the things that really impressed me though was when I started hitting a couple of snags when running a couple of programs, including Postfix (whose developers decided it would be useful for it to use literally about 90 unix sockets). This caused a problem for the resource limits in the VPS for sockets. Also the kernel memory limit was causing memory allocations to fail as well.
No sooner had I contacted Rus again than the resource limits had been raised to something a little bit more suitable. This also needed to be done for the process limit and file limit.
Tickets are answered very promptly and you can also contact them through MSN which I have made use of a couple of times.
Through this initial phase of getting the VPS running nicely Rus and the guys have been incredibly helpful and accommodating in getting things sorted. I would highly recommend them to anybody looking for a low price VPS, and although I know this is only after the first couple of days I'm sure things will continue this way.
We recently migrated our internal data center into Galaxyvisions as a colo customer.
Initially we leased a server from then to review and understand how they truly operate and respond to issues. I must say we have been nothing short of amazing on the support side.
Based upon this we decided to colo some of our equipment and have been equally impressed. The sales people worked with us to avoid the fear of a huge bill at the end of month and proactively reviewed our bandwith usage and requirements.
Staff onsite was great, courteous and very knowledgeable.
I just thought id let users know of my excellent experience so far with VT6, I ordered their diamond VPS plan along with cPanel and management. Setup was swift and took 12 Hours including server optimization and hardening.
Ive only been with them since wednesday. They were very friendly with answering all my presales questions. Support tickets are answered within 15 Minutes and one of mine was answered in 3 Minutes which is impressive. They have sorted out a few issues for me ive had after initial setup swiftly.
The server is not oversold and the VPS runs nice and quickly.
So thumbs up to VT6, So far so good. Ill be giving my 1 Month sometime in July
Here's my review. I've been with them for over 6 months I believe. I am not sure of the exact date. So far my service with them has been fairly poor.
Everything started out fine, for about a month I had good speeds. I then I made the mistake and rm -rf * in the wrong directory. Ooops, my mistake, new to having root access... luckily I stop it before I do too much damage to the vps server. I open up a support ticket, ask them if they can reload my OS and back up my data before they do it.
They said okay, but it will cost me $30 to redo it and they *will* backup my data before they do it.. Well, they reload my VPS and they DON'T back up my data... I lost all my work and had to reload backups from a week before. I run a large forum, so I lost about 20,000 posts from this. My mysql databases, etc worked fine beforehand but I removed most of my system files.... Worst part about it I paid $30 for the OS restore even though they didn't do what they said they would do and back it up.. They basically said too bad so sad...
Fast forward a few months, decent service, okay speeds. It can be VERY slow at times and takes about 10 seconds to load my page most of the time. The server shuts down for no reason often, and can be down for hours at a time, this happens fairly often. (Every other week or so) About a week ago my site goes down for 3 days and I lose yet another 10,000+ posts because the raid array dies, okay... It happens... Well, since I leave daily backups on the server nothing I can do about it. Now, my site has been down for about another 2-3 days. It finally came back online today..
I also run my business site off the vps along side my forums, and with the constant downtime I have lost thousands of dollars in downtime and data loss. I know it's my own fault for staying with them.
I read good reviews about them, but so far my service has been less than great. I'm trying to find another VPS in the price range. I have been really busy going to school full time and working full time, so I haven't had time to find another vps host and to move my vps server over.
I don't recommend them. Maybe I don't have good luck with hosting, but others seem to do well with them.
I have been with VT6 for one month now. I am going to write my one month review and let everyone on webhostingtalk know about their excellent service.
Pre-Sales:
The presales department were extremely helpful in answering all of my questions I had.
They didnt mind the many many questions I have and took time out of there schedule to answer them unlike other companies who couldnt be bothered to answer them and just ignored me. I give them 5/5 for Pre-sales
Service:
Overall the service has been excellent. Their nodes you can tell arent overloaded as the VPS's always run smoothly and theres never any lag in loading up websites because the main servers struggling. The VPS has been well optimized by them and has kept my servers load down even whilst running Vbulletin forums. I will also give their service a 5/5
Support:
Absolutely fantastic. Response times are unbelievably quick, I think the quickest response I had was just over a minute, That is an amazingly quick response time in my opinion. No more sitting around for hours waiting for your problems to be sorted. Their techs are very knowledgeable and know what they are doing and dont just say we will look into it, they tell you what the problem is and what they plan on doing to solve it.
Which is a plus for anyone wanting to learn as they go. They have done an excellent job in securing the VPS and installing various pieces of software to keep it secure. I cannot fault their support so I will give them another 5/5 for support
Overall:
VT6 is a fantastic company with well trained, knowledgeable staff and techs. After having tryed quite a few VPS hosts I would say that this is possibly the best host ive ever used as all of their service is flawless. 5/5 to VT6
If you need a VPS host and a custom solution, VT6 is the way to go.
I do not have any intentions of cancelling with them and I am looking into adding to my services I have with them.
I have been with Atjeu for a little under 4 months now, and have had no issues what-so-ever. Their support times are amazing, and their employees have been nothing but friendly and helpful.
Atjeu's price may be more expensive, but I can attest to their skill and abilities. The price is worth it, 150%. The network has been nothing but fantastic. There has been no downtime attributed to the data center's power or bandwidth providers.
Their SAM interface is everything anybody could possibly want. I have a Core2Quad Q6600, 5GB DDR2 RAM, 500GB SATA II, 80 IP's. This being used as one of our VPS servers, we need to be able to easily update our PTR records. Atjeu is one of the few data centers I know that you can log into their support area, click on "Server Management">"IP management" and put in your own PTR records. WITHOUT having to open a support ticket.
The bandwidth graphs they use are very helpful, and their overall layout of their support center is nothing but fantastic.
Friendly, helpful, and amazing service. I would recommend this company 150% to anybody needing a decent server. It is definatally not a "budget" server provider, and it may cost more than the norm, but trust me; its worth it.
As they say, you get what you pay for. Atjeu puts a whole new meaning to this. I got what I paid for, and then some.
I just realized it has been 4 years since I joined ServInt back in June of 2004. After coming to this realization I decided it was time to come back to this forum, where I first read glowing reviews of ServInt and post my 4 year review.
I guess a tribute to how well ServInt has worked for me over the years is the fact that I didn't have my login for this site anymore... easy to loose a login after 3 years of not needing to worry about, or look for a webhost. (A big thanks to Louis of the WHT community Leader fame for sorting out the problem). The last post I think I made was when I did my very long 1 year review here: [url]
Over the past 3 years my server needs have really grown. I now own and manage a portfolio of sites that generate 20 times more impressions (about 6.5 million per month) than I had when I first started with ServInt. In that time I've upgraded my hosting account multiple times to newer and better hardware. The upgrade process was super easy and seamless each time, one of the huge benefits of a VPS environment.
Support has remained consistently wonderful as has server response and uptime. Even with my limited server management knowledge, between their amazing staff and the incredible ServInt community forum I've been able to really grow my business without the stress that I would have dealt with had I chosen other options 4 years ago.
This review is considerably shorter than my one year review, but again, this is just a tribute to how well things have gone. I love being able to sleep peacefully at night knowing that things are covered.
Congratulations to Reed and staff for creating such an amazing company and business culture, and thanks to the great ServInt community for working together to answer questions and resolve problems. I think I've mentioned this before, but I've been amazed by Reed's demeanor as he deals with his staff and customers, and this permeates through all the dealings between ServInt employees and customers and between the community on the forums.
We've been having trouble with uptime and a SQL box through Lunar Pages in the past couple months and we couldn't take anymore trouble. As such, we went looking for a new Windows VPS provider. Given I'm not a Windows person by default, my daily computer is a Mac, I needed some hand-holding for the transition.
Through the research for a Windows VPS supplier here at WHT, I selected several firms to investigate and communicate with. Principally Host My Site, Liquid Web, and Bird Hosting. After conversations with each via email and phone calls, Michael of Bird Hosting [url] quickly rose to the top.
Michael, once we informed him of our intention to move to him, had our single-domain Windows VPS migrated from LunarPages to Bird Hosting overnight. Even when a SQL access issue rose up, Michael has been quick to respond and get our support system up and running again.
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
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.
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.
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.
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! )
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?
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.
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.
I am in the market for a VPS to act as a slave node to a distributed nagios setup I am setting up for myself.
Browsing the vps forums I came across Imountain. They sounded 'unique' to me, because of the solar power they claim to use to power their servers etc.
There was no test ip listed so I just traced their domain imountain.com and the subdomain cp.imountain.com (which is their hsphere control panel server I am assuming) which pointed to: 76.79.76.100.. A traceroute of this shows business grade road runner.
Quote:
traceroute to 76.79.76.100 (76.79.76.100), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 ev1s-207-218-205-161.ev1servers.net (207.218.205.161) 0.805 ms 0.719 ms 0.719 ms 2 gphou2-209-85-1-6.ev1servers.net (209.85.1.6) 0.377 ms 0.311 ms 0.328 ms 3 gphou2-209-85-0-5.ev1servers.net (209.85.0.5) 0.331 ms 0.404 ms 0.316 ms 4 g0-10.na21.b015619-0.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com (38.99.215.153) 7.110 ms 7.031 ms 6.768 ms 5 g4-1-1-3827.core01.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.65.109) 6.825 ms 6.843 ms 6.803 ms 6 t4-1.mpd01.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.2.202) 7.151 ms 6.893 ms 7.055 ms 7 t2-3.mpd01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.186) 51.286 ms 36.483 ms 42.640 ms MPLS Label=1057 CoS=5 TTL=1 S=0 8 t3-4.mpd01.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.142) 36.344 ms 36.492 ms 36.660 ms 9 adelphia.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.11.46) 46.306 ms 46.374 ms 46.499 ms 10 ae-2-0.c0.lax91.twc-core.net (66.109.3.129) 46.644 ms 46.882 ms 46.878 ms 11 66.109.3.174 (66.109.3.174) 36.356 ms 39.534 ms 39.423 ms 12 tge7-1.bwlaca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com (66.75.161.202) 42.348 ms tge7-2.bwlaca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com (76.166.1.22) 39.154 ms tge7-1.bwlaca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com (66.75.161.202) 42.387 ms 13 tge8-3.lsanca2-rtr1.socal.rr.com (76.166.1.1) 42.985 ms 42.935 ms 42.802 ms 14 tge9-4.covnca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com (76.166.1.51) 40.246 ms 40.087 ms 40.146 ms 15 tge9-1.pomnca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com (76.166.1.53) 43.759 ms 43.880 ms 40.578 ms 16 cpe-76-166-3-210.socal.rr.com (76.166.3.210) 46.036 ms 43.782 ms 40.713 ms 17 rrcs-76-79-76-100.west.biz.rr.com (76.79.76.100) 44.086 ms !<10> 43.934 ms !<10> 43.985 ms !<10>
Now thinking to my self, I wouldn't host anything on road runner. Its not a reliable provider in my opinion.
question: Does road runner offer 1gbit/10gbit fiber links?
I decided to drive down there since its only ~30 miles away. I was actually pretty amazed by this. Its in the middle of nowhere really. There is a gas station, a motel, their building, and a ride share. I don't see how fiber would be economical in this location unless they pulled some from devry university which is further up the road.
Speaking of ride share, its pretty funny the google & yahoo maps show the ride share as their location on areal photos.
So I went down there and took these pictures, they are not the best since I was in my silverado and all I had was my camera phone.
Proof of address: [url]
Another from the front: [url]
From the freeway side (i went back and took this one after i left): [url]
There was no apparent solar panels on the ground level, which leaves me to believe they were on the roof, from the ground in my truck I couldn't see any on the roof so I cannot confirm that.
The questions that remain are this:
1.) Is there solar panels? and with a building that size how many would be needed to sustain it?
2.) Are they using road runner to host? If so does road runner do 1gbit fiber links?... that HAS to be pricey if they do.
3.) How secure is that building? It looks like a pretty basic office building.
4.) Air conditioning? Does that building have ample cooling?
These things I would never know because they do not allow tours of the facility.
Does any one have an vps with an Ip I can traceroute? I am curious to their network setup as they are very vague on it.
