Ok just some quick background. I'm developing a website that will start out small, and possibly grow. I know everyone has that dream, and many fail, so I'd like to start out small but be able to expand with the SAME hosting company (I don't want to have to switch hosts if the site ends up having a lot of traffic).
I have limited server administration experience, so want a clustered or shared hosting environment. I want a reputable company that I can grow into if necessary, and my budget is around $20 to $30 per month. Here are the ones I'm considering:
- iMountain : They offer a clustered environment and 500 GB transfer for just $30. Unfortunately, I think they are in California - is location a problem (as I am in Ohio).
- Cartika : They offer a clustered environment and allegedly have unparalleled support. But they are pretty expensive -- 25 GB transfer for $25, and based in Canada.
- Pair : They have a 200 GB transfer plan for just $30. They are also very close (Pennsylvania) to where I am. However, I believe you are on a non-clustered shared server, and they charge a $35 setup fee.
- FusedNetwork : They offer 100 GB transfer for just $20 and use cPanel (which I'm familiar with). However I've read a lot of controversy on here about FusedNetwork & Hostjury -- I don't want to sign up with a company if allegations of shady business practices are actually true.
Which one do you think I should go with? Does the location of the servers matter at all? Is being on a "cluster" instead of just plain "shared" that big of a deal? Am I overlooking anything else?
I'm leaning toward "Pair" right now, unless clustering turns out to be important.
I am getting close as being a 3 month customer for FusedNetwork.com I must say that this is the best host I've had by far! I've had about 4 hosts in the past, and FusedNetwork exceeds all my expectations. David, I must say that you and your staff rock!
Support: Ever waited hours just to get a reply? Well you don't have to anymore! You will get a real reply from a real person in 1-2 minutes. All of my tickets were answered and completed within 10 minutes! It would take other hosts much more time just to even answer with 1 reply... I've even asked them questions that don't pertain to hosting and they have answered them! This just shows you that these guys know their stuff! The best part of fusednetwork is communication. If there is a 1 minute downtime, they will explain why. They go above and beyond. I must tell them to sleep sometimes! (joke)
Reliability: These servers are lightning fast! They limit the number of users per server and they do not oversell. This is the secret to their success, I think, and I'm exposing the secret to WHT In the time I've been with them, there has been only 1 occasion where the server went down. A user had a script that skyrocketed the load and in turn, shut out FusedNetwork from the server. They had to contact the datacenter to restart, and and do their thing. The whole time, they kept us updated through their blog: status.fusednetwork.com and e-mail. They notified us first, and let us know what is going on. =]
Previous hosts: I've used Hostgator.com and found their support and speed to be nothing compared to Fusednetwork. Hostgator is too slow, too big, and their support isn't as fast as Fusednetwork I've also used Surpasshosting.com, but they were alright. My account kept getting moved onto different servers, and I didn't even add new content. It just randomly gets moved. My main concern was speed and I decided to move a VPS. I found out that VPS wasn't the best option so I left after one month and went back to shared hosting. This is where I found FusedNetwork
Features: They have some pretty neat features such as the nightly backup. They are offsite and if I ever need a backup they can restore it within 60 seconds! I never needed to use it though. If you are wanting to host multiple domains, I wouldn't recommend FN. If you are looking for quality, speed, and fast support, FusedNetwork is for you!
I am torn between Cartika and MediaLayer. I am looking to have 2 sites hosted with them. I am at the moment only considering these two options. I am looking for reliability, speed, and true multihosting along with CDP back ups. The third contender was UnitedHosting, but they are a smidge more expensive. I will be hosting one Joomla site and one Wordpress site. Price wise they are on par. Both their reps seem outstanding. I need a nudge one way or the other.
A little less than two years ago I launched an internet web service. After doing some research on various internet boards including this one, I decided to go with shared hosting on Cartika, because the prices were reasonable, but more importantly, they offered the ability to scale as my service grew.
Getting everything set up was fairly easy, and the control panel isn't too difficult to use (it was a little confusing to me at first, but I eventually figured it out). They were tolerant of the occassional spikes in traffic that my service would see, but eventually it got to the point where shared hosting no longer made sense and they moved me to a managed dedicated host, with only a minor hiccup during the transition which they promptly resolved.
As traffic continued to grow, I began hitting the ceiling of my dedicated host and recently, I decided to move off Cartika to unmanaged dedicated hosting to better tailor my host to my needs.
During my time with Cartika, I never experienced a prolonged outage. I never had any hardware issues. Any support I needed was quickly responded to. Basically, I have no complaints. If you're looking for managed hosting, I can recommend them without hesitation.
What company of this list would you choose to host your site:
-Verio
-Liquidweb
-Cartika
-Myriad Network
Some offer cluster hosting, some normal shared hosting, others are longtime runners in the hosting industry.
Please, have your say and tell why would you choose them, if you have had previous experience with them. Do you think you can trust them to host an important web site?
it was about 2 yrs back when I subscribed to WHT and diligently went through the webHosting threads to decide on a suitable webHost. My search ended with PAIR. I chose PAIR basically bcuz I wanted peace of mind which I wasnt sure that other cheaper webhosts cud provide after reading lukewarm reviews(-ve and +ve) about them. The only downside to PAIR was it was costly and I did a lot of spelunking online(for a week atleast) but found almost zero -ve reviews about PAIR.
i am not here to praise PAIR cuz its a solid company anyway. The thing is I have a basic account with PAIR which doesnt have MySql/CGI....etc. I am planning to start a few blogs and install a CMS like Joomla. Obviously I will be needing databases and scripting. I can upgrade to an Advanced account with PAIR which has all the features I need. BUT that will cost me double the basic accnt.
So heres the dilemma-
Should I upgrade and stay with PAIR. OR Should I change to another cheaper Webhost
The deciding factor-
1) PEACE OF MIND- translates to A class service and support. 2) Somewhat ECONOMICAL
I was wondering whether Lunarpages will be a good idea.
forgot to add- my bandwidth(10GB +) and storage(1GB +) requirements aren't high.
On setting up a pair of CPanel DNS only servers, I decided to use 2 Virtual Servers from 2 seperate companies - one Xen and the other was Openvz. Reason behind it was in case something happens to the company or the virtualization technology implemented, I'm not screwed.
Guess what! Next day my Openvz node (I will not name the provider) went south and I'm on one leg right now. I'm kinda pleased with myself for having this laid out from the beginning and DNS is still working fine.
Now I'm thinking of having different OS - one linux and the other freebsd. Am I paranoid and over-the-top?
I started a website in HTML, then by different CMS (SPIP, Joomla), and now I use several PHP shopping carts scripts (Virtuemart, CS-Cart). Currently I have 10 sites.
I NEVER had a hacking attempt in 9 years. None security concerns. No downtime more than 20 minutes. Cumulated over the last 9 years, all downtime are less than 4 hours.
You can check by yourself any downtime of any Pair.com server, because Pair.com downtime archives are easy to check, on-line and updated in real time:
[url]
My only concern is spam. When one of my email address catch too much of spam, I just need to close and open up a new address to defeat it (sorry, it's the easy way to fight with spam, but I'm not enough smart to setup SpamAssassin).
The speed of my shopping carts is great (I'm on a shared server).
That's why I stay at Pair.com: (for me) There's nothing better!
The great team over at Pair has treated our website (www.Team-BHP.com) exceedingly well. In fact, I'd also posted a review of my experience way back in 2005 (Linky). I'm a pretty demanding customer, yet have no complaints with Pair through this long association. Says a lot, wot?
However, I see Team-BHP outgrowing Pair in the near future. Our traffic increases by atleast 25 - 30% each quarter, and we are currently hosting on the QS5 server level. The server does choke occasionally during peak hours, hence an upgrade is inevitable sooner rather than later. The next (and final) level of upgrade from Pair is the QS6.....which is pretty expensive @ $1,500 bucks a month! I've seen other hosts offering the same kind of juice for half the money, yet never moved away from Pair simply because of their solid service + uptime. However, now that we are growing (and are poised for a more fruitful future ), what are some viable options I can look at?
Our requirement is QUALITY : Outstanding levels of service, uptime, reliability & security are imperative.
1. Any other reputable hosts that you may recommend? Our requirement would be standard fare for a medium size website (dual xeon, 8gb ram, 3 or 4 15K SAS raid 10 hard disks, backup, 100Mbs public + 1000Mbs private port and about 3000 GB of bandwith a month)?
2. Is co-location a good idea, considering that our core team really isn't all that tech-friendly?
I’ve found pair Networks via this forum and have been its customer for more than 2 years now, which gave me quite a good insight in this company. So here some thoughts about pair Networks.
Some background
Pair operates its own Data Center with over 1.500 servers, hosting more than 190.000 sites. If you are concerned about the server saturation, these numbers are speaking for themselves pretty much. Among the customers are such high-profile sites as Barack Obama, The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code), Tom's Hardware etc. Quite impressive and it actually says a lot about the host’s structural reliability.
Stability
It’s a truly business class host with an amazing stability. The server load is always nice below 1. During more than 2 years the site I’m hosting there was down for two times: once due to the massive ddos, and the second time due to the planned server maintenance.
Technical support
I’ve got phone and e-mail support on my plan (webmaster). The standard support response time is reasonably soon. The so called ‘urgent’ support reacts literally immediately. The nice thing with Pair is that you actually don’t need any support, because all services are up and running at all time.
Control Panel
Pair is using a custom CP. It’s transparent and as useful as a CP could be. I can’t remember a situation when I was missing some feature in this panel.
Price
Pair is not cheap, but it’s not overpriced either. From my point of view, they were able to find a really well balanced price for the level of services they’re offering. If you’re a hobbyist using your site for fun (and therefore the stability and uptime is not really an issue), you can find tons of cheaper hosts. If you’re hosting any critical site, where the stability, speed and uptime do matter, you’d better pay a few bucks more: servers are not oversaturated and overloaded, no kids experimenting with 'custom' scripts, best hardware, best manpower etc. I’d like not to be involved in over- and underselling discussion, Pair has earned its stripes based on this business model.
Speed
Download speed (from Belgium) is as good as it gets from any US-based industrial-grade site through our broadband line: approximately 400 KB/s. Downloads from Apple, Adobe etc. sites have exactly the same speed.
These all were PRO’S, where are the CON’S?
In more than 2 years I haven’t noticed any serious, structural shortcoming. And I don’t like to make it up just for the sake of false objectivity. Pair Networks is by far the best host I’ve ever had.
Pair is really well respected (from what I've heard), but their dedicated servers are a lot more expensive than many I've looked at. I've honestly wanted to use them because of their reputation, and my uptime being critical, but wanted to see if there are less expensive servers who are just as good...
I am one month short of 2 years hosting with the guys at iMountain.com and I couldn't be happier.
My American Idol blog has made the steps from a shared account with them to their semi-dedicated to a single core dedicated to a brand spanking new dual core dedicated server in the past 23 months. Yes the new server is overkill 8 months out of the year but during American Idol I need all the server I can get. Last season saw 1500+ online at one time.
A huge thanks for the server move this past weekend. A fairly transparent move with minor issues that were sorted out quickly. awesome job
Uptime
has been great for me. hyperspin reports 99.87% uptime for my server. Can't complain about that at all considering most downtime recorded is actually server upgrades.
support
This is still imountain's strongest aspect IMO. Their support is very knowledgeable, fast and even will help with 3rd party scripts. The have helped me setup a couple of custom things, always answer my questions with personal responses, not canned messages and always get issues solved. they have been there all hours and have fixed or setup anything I have ever asked for.
They also have phone support which I have used once just to ask them about an issue real quick. For me email support is better.
price
very competitive for what you get. Fast servers, access to a huge house database server even on the cheapest shared accounts. You are not on oversold servers. (trust me, I am running Status2K on a shared account as well and the server load is almost always perfect). Not to mention their support team is worth every penny. I just had a support ticket in to setup email notification to me on any cronjobs and it took them less than 5 minutes to do it and respond. Absolutely amazing.
con's
HSPERE control panel which takes some getting used to. I have it mastered now but when I first signed up I was lost as hell.
what i would like to see
I would love to see a customer forum. At one point they said they were going to install one but at this point nothing has come of it.
Still would like to see support sign the names to support tickets so I know who is who. if the support ticket does have a name it is always imountain.com not the techs name
in closing my hosting experience with iMountain has been the best ever and it gets better and better all the time. If you are in need of great hosting with a good support team give them a try
Just wanted to drop a quick review on my current host iMountain.com since I have been so pleased with them and tonight they really went above the call of duty.
First a little background. Been with iMountain since November 2007 on Shared, Luxury and now Dedicated. I run custom DNS with a rollover solution so if my dedicated server with iMountain goes down, my blog will show a splash page that is hosted on another server.
Tonight for some reason the DNS thought my site was down and it rolled over to the backup server. iMountain staff happened to drop by my blog and noticed I was loading the rollover server and fired me off an email to tell me that something was amiss with my DNS since my server with them was in fact up.
How often would a host email you with a problem? Unless it is to suspend you, not very often I would think.
I give the guys at iMountain 2 thumbs up for going above and beyond the call of duty each and everyday. They truly are a great hosting company. I hope to be with them as long as I am in need of a server.
The only big thing I would like to see different at iMountain is having them install a user forum. most hosts these days have them and iMountain should too.
cant believe its almost been a year already, but like sand through the hour glass so goes the days of our lives. anyway, my almost year with imountain has been one of pure bliss. everyone on the imountain team needs to be commended cause they have consistently been there when i needed them and have truly bent over backwards to answer any remedial question i may pose or fulfill any request without hesitation. their support team is phenomenal and have truly gone above and beyond the call of duty and it has been truly appreciated.
uptime has been excellent. there has been only a few hours of downtime and most of that has been scheduled. even though they had to shut me down last week, but i truly couldnt be mad at them cause they did everything they could to rectify the issue. i run a music blog and some spider/bot was trying to download everything in my directories at one time which of course brought/slowed down the server i am on. i could tell that they hated taking me down, but business is business and i know i was affecting other people's businesses. in the end they tracked down the main offender and everything returned to normal.
in regards to speed, i think my site loads pretty quickly. i have not been told otherwise. people are quick to complain about other stuff and loading times has not been one of their gripes.
all in all i would give them a 9.5 out of 10 and will continue to recommend them to anyone who will listen.
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.
