IMountain Review
Oct 1, 2009
I am one month short of 2 years hosting with the guys at iMountain.com and I couldn't be happier.
My American Idol blog has made the steps from a shared account with them to their semi-dedicated to a single core dedicated to a brand spanking new dual core dedicated server in the past 23 months. Yes the new server is overkill 8 months out of the year but during American Idol I need all the server I can get. Last season saw 1500+ online at one time.
A huge thanks for the server move this past weekend. A fairly transparent move with minor issues that were sorted out quickly. awesome job
Uptime
has been great for me. hyperspin reports 99.87% uptime for my server. Can't complain about that at all considering most downtime recorded is actually server upgrades.
support
This is still imountain's strongest aspect IMO. Their support is very knowledgeable, fast and even will help with 3rd party scripts. The have helped me setup a couple of custom things, always answer my questions with personal responses, not canned messages and always get issues solved. they have been there all hours and have fixed or setup anything I have ever asked for.
They also have phone support which I have used once just to ask them about an issue real quick. For me email support is better.
price
very competitive for what you get. Fast servers, access to a huge house database server even on the cheapest shared accounts. You are not on oversold servers. (trust me, I am running Status2K on a shared account as well and the server load is almost always perfect). Not to mention their support team is worth every penny. I just had a support ticket in to setup email notification to me on any cronjobs and it took them less than 5 minutes to do it and respond. Absolutely amazing.
con's
HSPERE control panel which takes some getting used to. I have it mastered now but when I first signed up I was lost as hell.
what i would like to see
I would love to see a customer forum. At one point they said they were going to install one but at this point nothing has come of it.
Still would like to see support sign the names to support tickets so I know who is who. if the support ticket does have a name it is always imountain.com not the techs name
in closing my hosting experience with iMountain has been the best ever and it gets better and better all the time. If you are in need of great hosting with a good support team give them a try
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Apr 3, 2009
well I have been with imountain now since 11/01/07 and they still are by far the best hosting company I have ever been with.
I started on a simple clustered shared plan, moved to their clustered semi-dedicated plan and now am on my own dedicated server (opteron 246 with 4GB of RAM). my server runs a wordpress blog that last wednesday night had 868 concurrent connections and ran as smooth as if there were only 10 concurrent connections. WP-Cache, xCache and memcache (huge server) are utilized as well as offloading images to steadyoffload.com
uptime
There were a couple of issues in the past but nothing major for me. The MYSQL outage didn't affect me as I wasn't on the house database server cluster that went down. there are the occasional issues for a few minutes here and there but nothing major at all.
Hyperspin show my uptime 99.891% since January (there was a large DDOS attack in there).
I can live with that considering I have failover in that if the imountain server goes offline a splash page from another hosting account(In UK) shows up within 3 minutes stating the server is offline and will be back up soon. When imountain comes back online within 3 minutes the splash page is gone and my blog shows again.
support
This is imountain's strongest aspect IMO. Their support is very knowledgeable, fast and even will help with 3rd party scripts. The have helped me setup a couple of custom things, always answer my questions with personal responses, not canned messages and always get issues solved.
They also have phone support which I have used once just to ask them about an issue real quick. For me email support is better.
price
I can't go into this topic much for certain reasons but their prices IMO are competitive.
con's
HSPERE control panel which takes some getting used to. I have it mastered now but when I first signed up I was lost as hell.
what i would like to see
I would love to see a customer forum. At one point they said they were going to install one but at this point nothing has come of it.
If they don't want to do a forum, I would like to see more updates on their blog when issues arise.
Still would like to see support sign the names to support tickets so I know who is who. if the support ticket does have a name it is always imountain.com not the techs name.
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Jan 30, 2009
I never, ever thought that I would ever have to write an 18 month review of a webhost ... but here I am. That is because, quite simply; I have never stayed with a web hosting company before for over a year, until now.
Technically my 18 month anniversary is February 5th; but since I have been quite busy with other projects; I thought I would use the bit of free time that I do have right now to post the review. So here it is.
- - - - - -
THE GOOD: iMountain is still there (obviously). Their servers remain fast; and so does the network. There was the network outage in late October 2008; and the router failure a couple a week or two ago; but other than that things have been rock solid *knock on wood*. I am lucky to be on a fast server where people rarely; if ever; bog it down.
Also, Brandon and his crew continue to keep up a mostly top notch level of support.
They have been a bit slower than in the past to respond; but I suspect that is because they are getting busier and growing. It comes with the territory, I suppose.
THE BAD: Communication (as noted above) has been a tad worse than in the past. I am not 100% sure if that is their fault or not; but I wish that it could be improved, if possible. But I do appreciate the fact that we got a nice discount off of our next bill for the major network outage that happened in October 2008.
Other than that, not much to write home about.
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Mar 28, 2009
[Reposted]
I’ve had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I’ve concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I’ve used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).
Summary
Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered
Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum
Pre-sales and pricing
I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=649322), which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.
Migration
Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don’t offer to do the migration for you and I didn’t yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.
Support
Support quality is definitely one of iMountain’s strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It’s all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I’ve experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They’re also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it’s worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There’s no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There’s a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they’re barely used.
Speed
Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I’ve only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they’ve all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "…we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we’re here to make sure your visitors get through…". So far I haven’t tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].
Reliability
I’ve been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year [url]
and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I’m a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I’m still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host.
Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.
File permission issues
Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can’t subsequently be modified or removed by it. It’s a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It’s all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.
An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it’s no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.
Certificates
I found that iMountain’s security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven’t encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you’re planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I’ve simply gone back to unencrypted connections.
E-Mail
Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I’ve had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail.
There’s no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.
Control panel
The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don’t work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.
Backups
There’s no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).
Solar power
The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.
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Feb 22, 2009
I've had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I've concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I've used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).
Summary
Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered
Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum
Pre-sales and pricing
I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see [url] [url],which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.
Migration
Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don't offer to do the migration for you and I didn't yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.
Support
Support quality is definitely one of iMountain's strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It's all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I've experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They're also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it's worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There's no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There's a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they're barely used.
Speed
Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I've only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they've all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "...we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we're here to make sure your visitors get through...". So far I haven't tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].
Reliability
I've been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year
[url]
and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I'm a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I'm still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host.
Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.
File permission issues
Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can't subsequently be modified or removed by it. It's a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It's all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.
An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it's no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.
Certificates
I found that iMountain's security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven't encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you're planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I've simply gone back to unencrypted connections.
E-Mail
Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I've had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail.
There's no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.
Control panel
The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don't work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.
Backups
There's no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).
Solar power
The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.
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Apr 10, 2008
Feel free to move this post to another place, I couldn't find a place to put webhost reviews. Been running around and am just now getting to my review of them... Its been about 9 months since I got my account at imountain.com and they've been great. I'm always updated on any scheduled downtimes, and even unexpected downtimes (crashes/hardware failure etc.). There has been only one occasion where my site went down during the middle of the day, some user foolishly created a poor SQL statement and it dropped the server. This was fixed within 2 hours and we were back online.
My site only has ~50 users so its low load, other than that one time everyone is happy with it.
Imountain.com's support staff have been more than excellent, they've answered all my questions quickly and with detail. The only downside (for me) is that since I'm not on a VPS I don't have any shell access but its understandable for security reasons so its not a big deal and it was expected on my part.
I'm a fairly technical person, work about 95% of the time in a linux desktop and server environment and am used to having shell access to our servers to do maintenance so the web maintenance was a bit different but easy to use too. All together though, great prices, great service and great support staff. I think I'll be keeping my account at imountain.com and not moving.
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Aug 9, 2008
i,m sad that at the end i did leave imountain.com
and left my server with them
but with the time my biz is growing like crazy and the server i was using with imountain.com is not powerful to handle that growth .
let me just tell you my story
i rent the server coz they have a crazy offer here
first i did not know them well but with the time and my tickets and my emails
everything is clear like crystal that they are a professional company
they know what they are doing .
i,m not a professional to keep my server unmanaged so they did manged it for me
they have always respond to my tickets and emails less than 15 minutes that,s crazy i know but they are really very fast support i have ever seen .
and i also lean from them i always asked them when they finished fixing my problems what did you do to fix that and they always answered me
i really have felling for that company and i well come back to them when they have a crazy offer for powerful server quad cores
many thanks to theres support and staff you rocks imountain.com
i,m now with LSN and manged by webbycart.com/management.htm
webbycart.com/management.htm
i,m with them less than 1 month but really like them very fast respond
thank to tisha from webbycart.com
if you need more info just pm
imountain.com
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Sep 25, 2008
I have an account with iMountain since August 2007 and have nothing but good things to say about them.
First, when I signed up I used one of their coupons that were available back then and signed up for solarcluster3.
I also had time to test their VPS for a few months but got back to solarcluster, didn't had too much time to manage the VPS.
Uptime: in one year I had about 3 outages, two small ones and the bigger one that some of you know about when their MySQL cluster crashed (I got compensated for this). We all know downtime is inevitable and I'm very happy on how they managed the issue. Looking forward to another year with this kind of uptime. Over 99.9+ overall.
Support: they are very fast to reply and fix issues, take backups of your account or do some custom php settings / installs. I really feel they are holding my hand here.
I'm currently using 2.3GB of space and in some (good) months I use over 150GB transfer. Sometimes I have over 200 visitors online on my wordpress blogs. All sites load very fast, no load issues etc.
I only signed up to test them out (for 1 month, 1 year ago) but they are just too good and I feel very comfortable with them.
I have my main sites there so I'm looking forward for at least one more year with them.
If there's anything else you guys want to know, just ask
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Apr 6, 2008
Didn't write a review last month cause I didn't feel the need to, but I will this month.
Main reason being because I am going on vacation from June 1st to the 5th, and my payments are due on the 5th day of the month. So I call iMountain and Brandon picked up. He was happy to inform me that it would not be a problem if I paid a day or two late so that I could get back from my vacation and get settled first without having to go "omgz I need to feed iMountain!"
Also, I have had absolutely zero downtime in the past 2 months since the mySQL server cluster RAID fault. Now that I said that, they will have downtime. (Joking) Thank god I backup nightly. Anyway, the databases are MUCH faster now since they upgraded the cluster, no complaints there.
The support staff continue to be very helpful (as always), especially the night crew.
Don't usually email / call during the day unless it's to talk to Brandon. Must be since I'm a night owl.
Anyway, on to 1 year (hopefully)!
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Jun 16, 2008
I have been with iMountain.com for 8 months now and I wanted to give a quick followup on my progress with them.
Personally I can't say anything bad about these guys. They are truly a top notch operation on all levels. I started my busy American Idol blog out on a shared account and moved on to their managed luxury cluster in February and all I can say is wow. They propelled my blog through the entire season of Idol with little in the way of issues. Because of there service, help and expertise I was able to sustain 700 concurrent connections when David Cook was crowned the winner of season 7.
Uptime - there have been a couple of issues over the months, both of the big ones were discussed here but all outages were handled with great professionalism. Timely emails with updates were sent out and the problems were fixed with little downtime. The latest mysql outage didn't affect me since I have a dedicated mysql server. I did have a fairly serious DDoS attack over a period of 5 days that affected downtime but I was moved to a different server when all other options failed.
Support - These guys are fabulous. They have went above the call of duty at all hours of the day and night answering all of my requests for help. Believe me there have been a lot of support tickets. Mind you 99% of these were just for help on something and not really related to a problem with my hosting account that affected service. (Stating that so people don't think there is an issue with the hosting at iMountain)
Not to mention these guys are great at helping with 3rd party products. How many other support companies will attempt to help you with an issue with your wordpress or gallery install? None that I have ever had. I give them a huge thanks for all of that.
Price - You get what you pay for. iMountain may be a little more expensive with their shared and luxury clusters than some of those oversellers out there but you are getting a great service with these guys. Searching the forums will also find you some discounts you can apply to save a little money.
There is actually so much more I could say about these guys but I think from this review and the other ones floating around the forums that you get the idea that these guys mean business.
honestly I have tried various other hosting options in the past few Idol season from shared at surpass, dedicated at surpass and whatever you call mosso but I have found my home till the day my blog is taken offline. I truly won't be able to find anyone as dedicated to me and my blog as the fellows at iMountain. They take great pride in their service and for that I am truly thankful.
link is in my signature for verification that I am hosted on iMountain.
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Jul 2, 2008
I forgot to write a 10 month review so here is my (almost) 11 month review.
GOOD: Support continues to be as fast as ever. I received a reply to one of my tickets the other day in under a minute. Must be a record. Also, the servers continue to fly along at lightning speed, as does their internet connection.
BAD: Only downtime since my last review occurred when their mySQL cluster server borked on June 1st and crashed. Other than that, mostly everything has been doing pretty good.
RECOMMENDATION: Solar power rules. Support is fast, efficient, and friendly. The servers are mostly reliable; but the hSphere panel can be a bit cumbersome for newcomers. Overall, I give iMountain a 9.9 / 10, or an A+ rating.
Next month I will write a better review as on August 5th will be my 1 year anniversary with them (a first with any host with me! )
Site for review: [url]
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Oct 31, 2007
I needed more control over my aplications (needed SSH, eaccelerator) and I upgraded from their Solar Cluster 3 to their 512RAM emeraldVPS.
Let me tell you the setup that these guys have rules in every way.
The only thing that runs on the VPS is Apache so you might have an idea that this may perform better in some aplications than most 1GB RAM dedicated servers that also run MySQL, mail and other services ...at a fraction of the price. MySQL, mail and dns runs on their clusters. I installed zend and eaccelerator, and now my busy Romanian blog (with wpcache) runs in 82MB RAM
I'm going to move 90% of my sites there, I have lots of space and resources to grow.
According to cpuinfo I also benefit from 8 of these:
CPU model name:
Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 865
The support guys have always been fair and square to me, they answered fast to all my questions (mostly less than 10 minutes), moved my sites on the VPS and told me what's good and what's not so good about their VPS (yes, they told me without asking them about the minor "inconvenience" I may have with the VPS before I bought it). I feel they are the kind of guys you would love going to parties and drinking beer with.
Random screenshot of htop: [url]
I don't know what more to say
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Aug 3, 2007
I recently changed providers after a short search, including input from this thread [url].
I opted to go with a semi-dedicated package from Iron Mountain ( www.imountain.com ). I was mostly impressed with their clustered solution and dedicated mySQL servers to host our increasingly busy Vbulletin forums. They also answered email inquires very quickly; another good sign, given the few comments I could find about them at WHT.
While I was intrigued about the solar-powered claim, I knew that many in our community would appreciate that aspect as well.
Ultimately, I wasn't quite convinced our forum issues were mainly related to CPU/memory resource use. So, I narrowed my search to providers that also claimed to have a good setup for SQL. These included Cartika Hosting and MediaLayer, among others (Thank you to all who responded with input and offers!). At that point, it came down to lowest price and iMountain's offer was also in the upper end of the price range supported by recent member donations. In case I was wrong about the CPU resources, at least this would at least allow some time to save for the dedicated solution that many recommended.
As it turns out, the CPU/memory resources were not the issue at all. It seems that our forum issues at the previous provider were primarily due to their SQL implementation.
In fact, they were going to generously allow us to continue on our $50/year plan for a while given that we weren't yet hogging resources. Nonetheless, the slowdowns and SQL errors continued until the last day. In any case, I can still recommend AddAction.net for anyone looking for a competitively priced basic hosting package if you don't have major SQL requirements. It was inexpensive, but I believe I got a lot more than I paid for.
Since the switch, the forums have been running great. No slowdowns, no freezes, no infinite waits to read/make a post, no flood of SQL error email messages. Most importantly, no user complaints so far. In addition, I've been told that we aren't even putting a scratch in our resource allocations in any area and there should be plenty of room for growth that has been doubling about every 6 months for the last few years.
The transfer was quick and the switchover had minimal downtime given that the new plan included a dedicated IP address for me to direct users of the forums during the DNS propagation. There were a couple minor issues during the switch, but their tech support team responded very quickly. They also helped setup a memcache for the forums and suggested some other tweaks to further improve performance.
Overall, I am very satisfied so far. I'll report again in a couple months when I have a better feel for downtime and more time for users to comment.
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Feb 6, 2009
Just wanted to drop a quick review on my current host iMountain.com since I have been so pleased with them and tonight they really went above the call of duty.
First a little background. Been with iMountain since November 2007 on Shared, Luxury and now Dedicated. I run custom DNS with a rollover solution so if my dedicated server with iMountain goes down, my blog will show a splash page that is hosted on another server.
Tonight for some reason the DNS thought my site was down and it rolled over to the backup server. iMountain staff happened to drop by my blog and noticed I was loading the rollover server and fired me off an email to tell me that something was amiss with my DNS since my server with them was in fact up.
How often would a host email you with a problem? Unless it is to suspend you, not very often I would think.
I give the guys at iMountain 2 thumbs up for going above and beyond the call of duty each and everyday. They truly are a great hosting company. I hope to be with them as long as I am in need of a server.
The only big thing I would like to see different at iMountain is having them install a user forum. most hosts these days have them and iMountain should too.
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Aug 3, 2008
cant believe its almost been a year already, but like sand through the hour glass so goes the days of our lives. anyway, my almost year with imountain has been one of pure bliss. everyone on the imountain team needs to be commended cause they have consistently been there when i needed them and have truly bent over backwards to answer any remedial question i may pose or fulfill any request without hesitation. their support team is phenomenal and have truly gone above and beyond the call of duty and it has been truly appreciated.
uptime has been excellent. there has been only a few hours of downtime and most of that has been scheduled. even though they had to shut me down last week, but i truly couldnt be mad at them cause they did everything they could to rectify the issue. i run a music blog and some spider/bot was trying to download everything in my directories at one time which of course brought/slowed down the server i am on. i could tell that they hated taking me down, but business is business and i know i was affecting other people's businesses. in the end they tracked down the main offender and everything returned to normal.
in regards to speed, i think my site loads pretty quickly. i have not been told otherwise. people are quick to complain about other stuff and loading times has not been one of their gripes.
all in all i would give them a 9.5 out of 10 and will continue to recommend them to anyone who will listen.
my site is [url]
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Sep 8, 2008
During the past 24 hours, two things have happened with iMountain.com that I wanted to let you all know about.
1. I uncovered a bug in the Webshell application that they use (bundled with Hsphere) which was preventing me from gzipping up my and my buddy's owsweather.com site for weekly backups. Reported it in an email, and in 2 minutes I had a reply back saying that they would notify Hsphere of the issue since it's a bug in the software. Good job there.
2. The big one is that the same owsweather.com site is getting clobbered by HUGE amounts of traffic - more than we ever have in our 8 year history. We have received over 2500 unique IP visits since midnight (it is now 5 minutes until 6:00 am PDT in California).
I must give major props to iMountain for building rock solid servers which don't bog down under high traffic load, and also for allowing us to "use" their servers for what they are INTENDED to be used for! If it wasn't for them and allowing our site to have bursts of traffic like this *see Dreamhost, Bluehost, and other similar reviews*, we would be in a very tight spot indeed. So thanks Brandon and crew. You have done us well.
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May 7, 2008
I haven't got time to spend forever comparing hosts, so i had a quick look around and saw good things said about imountain and medialayer.
I bought a wordpress blog which is currently doing 75k uniques per month (probably not much in the scheme of things). I am aim to buy or build several more blogs of this size plus a couple of ecommerce stores.
I think as per 1 good review i saw of imountain, that either host would probably do, but can anyone offer some advice of if speed is significantly different between either of them or if there is any other reason i might be swayed either way?
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Oct 17, 2007
In recent months i was jumping from one vps
to another vps benchmarking and at the same time testing webpages response using webmin.
And, my conclusion is that imountain.com H-Sphere vps has the fastest webpages updates
under the load, even when processor cpu usage is at 80%.
Hmm, how do they do it.
Needless to say i am staying put with them.
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Aug 14, 2007
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.
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Feb 13, 2009
I am a music producer who will need hosting for my official site, music files playing off links from my myspace page, podcasts, downloadable mp3's/DJ promo MP3's, flash movies/animated gifs. It might even be a Flash Site altogether. I will also probably want to have an artist design me a whole new myspace page that will have flash movies in the design, and will look like a totally independent web page. I'll want things like a section on my myspace for my "Top Tracks" in my current DJ sets that would play (clips) by clicking on them (even though they'd be hosted on my server space), and probably doing things like that, where I'd post files in other places (Facebook, etc). All the myspace artwork, banners, files, etc. will need a host.
I will also be planning on utilizing email for marketing purposes, and will be building a never-endingly lengthy email list.
Later down the road, I do see myself creating a company (already have the domains purchased), that will involve commerce (paying for mp3's etc.), and possibly a "community environment" that would involve profiles, interaction, etc. But that's, indeed, step 2 (I'm sure my life will involve a dedicated server at some point).
I definitely want speed! I've seen some music artists with the overhauled myspace pages that look like websites, and it takes forever for the page to load... I'm thinking "great design, slow host".
I do see 2 companies, SharkSpace and iMountain, that have impressed me with their primarily positive reviews. Many people say (about iMountain) "Oh their servers are FAST!", but I don't see any actual stats on bandwidth. And they're not cheap. Also, all of the "featured sites" on their site seem to be nothing "dynamic".... just some blogs. SharkSpace has their bandwidth (data transfer) listed as "1TB (1,000,000MB)", which I'm not sure tells me the "bandwidth", just the monthly transfer limit? They do have the 50% off specials I see on here
Do I need any type of "specialized market" host company? Do some hosts do better with Flash? It seems whenever I look at examples of websites using any host I read about, it's like a quiet website where someone posted some jpgs and a bio. I'm guessing my needs will be more than that.
I'd estimate my site and myspace will have about 100 people coming to each a day (I do have fans, just not a site.) I should be about to achieve about 100 visitors/day on my site (about 200 plays/day on my "myspace player", so I'm guessing when people get to my "DJ section" those hosted-clips could get around 200 plays/day as well).
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Jul 6, 2008
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.
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Mar 27, 2008
it would appear that Iron Mountain ( www.ironmountain.com ) has filed a trademark infringement suit against InterMountain Mortgage also known as Iron Mountain Hosting ( www.imountain.com ) regarding the use of "Iron Mountain" and various colors and service marks.
I don't think this will come as a surprise to many people given how similar these two names are, along with the fact that Iron Mountain have been involved in IT well before InterMountain Mortgage decided to take the plunge into hosting.
It's going to be an interesting trial by jury to say the least...
Reference:
[url]
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May 12, 2009
Is Godaddy cool for the casino review/sports betting review site?i searched a lot and submit Godaddy a ticket,still dont dig out.
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Dec 15, 2008
MonkeyWrench Hosting review - Three year review
I've been hosting my personal sites with MonkeyWrench Hosting for around three years now (coming up in January I believe), and I figured I'd share my experiences with them!
I've gone through a few hosts in my time, and some of them have been pretty rough. After using paid hosts, a niche free host started up that I stayed with for around a year before they eventually closed down.
I switched to MonkeyWrench Hosting at that point as a place to host my sites and store my files, and I have to say that I've been impressed throughout the time I've been with them.
Uptime/speed:
Fantastic! The sites have been perfectly reliable and speedy whenever I've gone to access them, and I haven't had any complaints from users. I did come across MySQL going down on one of the servers (I have two accounts for different purposes that are on seperate servers) in the past, but it was resolved quickly before I even needed to get help.
Support:
I've used the support a few times, but not for anything critical since there's not been the need. However, everything that I have asked was answered promptly in a professional manner.
Pricing:
Again, no complaints here. The pricing is pretty cheap, especially for the quality of service receieved. They aren't the cheapest on the Internet by any means, but you generally get what you pay for. I'm aware of what my realistic space/bandwidth needs are anyway, and I'd rather pick a host that clearly advertises what you'll receive over an 'unlimited' host.
All in all, MWH have been a fantastic choice and I couldn't have hoped for anything better.
So, thumbs up to Jonathan, and keep up the good work!
I'll report my domains for the moderators to check them out. =)
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Apr 26, 2009
I've been very happy with Virpus since I joined. There was 1 issue that has plagued me since the beginning and that was that I was not receiving e-mails on my ISP e-mail, my main e-mail. Not to big of an issue except that I didn't get any news updates or know when my tickets were replied to, or even when I was past due on my bill. 3 tickets later and their solution was for me to use another e-mail address, which was kind of a pain for me since each of my e-mail addresses has a specific reason which only specific e-mail get sent there for organizational reasons.
First off I have to say the VPS I was using was top notch. It easily outperformed my LiquidWeb VPSs and quickly became my primary VPS instead of my backup like was intended. I took advantage of one of their specials a while back which was a 512MB RAM cPanel VPS for $19.50/month which is a steal since the cPanel license alone is $15/month!
So now to why this is probably my final review of this company. Communication is lacking greatly. It was good at first, but now it's non-existant.
Over the weekend all my sites went down and I had no idea why... because I never got the e-mail saying they were moving data centers (if it weren't for a small thread on WHT I would never have known). I also did not receive any updates on extending their ETA so yet again I had nothing to tell my clients. The only good thing was that I run a free hosting company (Host2x.com for reference) and I offer no uptime guarantee since it's a non-paid service.
Ok, so the sites are back online and everything is working nicely... well I recently hit the 70% mark on my disk space usage so time to start looking for an upgrade. I created a ticket on April 23rd asking if they would allow me to upgrade my plan to their biggest VPS plan and to my surprise I never got a reply. I would think that a billing ticket asking to upgrade to a plan that costs more without the transfer of the discount I'm receiving would be a welcome ticket for them to reply to, but I was incorrect in thinking this. So I ended up purchasing a dedicated server last night because I cannot wait to see if they will assist me with upgrading my account or not.
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Sep 27, 2009
What seemed to be a good company quickly turned to nightmares. I purchased a couple domains. All went well. Then paypal emailed me saying they are high risk and wanted me to confirm I made the payment and service was given. So until I did the payment was held. They blame the held on me and threatened me to release it or they will cancel my account.
So they finally gave them the money and all was well. Well I did a stupid thing and decided to get a VPS from them, they have good deals so I thought, whats the worse that can happen. Well shortly after, I get a email saying because your payments are unreliable, we are waiting a week to setup your vps which is complete udder crap.
So I just said screw it and said give me a refund then and about 2 hours ago I try logging into my client center and my account is gone.
I am hoping one of them see this so we can get this worked out. In the mean time I opened disputes on all of the payments.
I will keep you all updated.
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Apr 17, 2009
I just want to take the time and review Hivelocity. Boy oh boy, where to start. I am just so pleased with the customer support they offer and I don't even own a single product with them.
I currently own a server with another comapny and I am always looking at other options for cheaper prices, better services and etc.
I found Hivelocity through WHT and I took the time to start up a live chat which was answered quickly from Kevin. Kevin was very nice and welcoming. I was asking about discounts they could provide and etc. Kevin showed me their reseller program which seemed to be something I may be interested in. After a 15-20 minute chat with Kevin, he offered to add me on MSN if I ever wanted to chat which I thought was pretty nice.
After I got off live chat with Kevin, I decided to keep researching Hivelocity. I immediately signed up on Twitter (I never had a Twitter Account). I saw they had some awesome deals. They were offering an awesome deal today it looks like this:
"The next person to go to our site, open a live chat and say "I just got your TWEET" gets a Core2Duo 3.0Ghz e8400 for $5 the first month."
By time I even got onto Twitter, I noticed that this was already taken. I kept browsing their Twitter and hey what do you know, another great deal it followed like this:
"The 1st $5 Core2Duo sold in about 20 seconds so lets do it again. The next person to open a live chat saying "Give me a $5 Server" gets it."
I decided I was going to be late as the last one sold in 20 seconds. Well, it turned out it did get sold but, I got into a Live Chat with David from Hivelocity.
David informed me that the server was sold and I was a bit too late. What do you know, more great discounts! He offered me the same server for $5 on the first month. I decided not to take advantage of the offer as I wouldn't be able to put much use to the offer. I will be moving to Hivelocity within the next 1-3 months.
Overall I am very pleased with the great offers they provide and the support is just amazing!
Based on the sales support and the deals they provide, I did a bit of a rating on Hivelocity.
Sales Support:5/5
Deals:5/5
Overall:5/5
Also, if you decide your interested in Hivelocity's awesome offers, I would follow them on Twitter! They are constantly updating their Twitter and offering great deals. Their Twitter deals are 100% and it's pretty awesome a company like Hivelocity offers products and support so great!
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May 5, 2009
I joined Limestonenetworks back in 2008 when it was a small company. At the time they offered the best price on the server I was looking for, so I took the plunge. The first 2 months were great, I enjoyed the stable network, and responses from the support team were fairly quick (1-2 hours response time). From there on it was all downhill, my servers were constantly down, and the support team took longer to answer my tickets. I didn't think this was a big problem, so I stayed with Limestonenetworks even though it was having problems with their network. Near December an incident occurred that really pushed me over the edge. My servers had been down for hours, so I opened a support ticket, and one of the agents replied and told me that the downtime was due to an upgrade in their network.
Again, I came to conclude that it could be far worst, so I stayed, one of the reasons was that I didn't want to switch my game servers over. It's important to keep in mind when you are running game servers, IPs play an important part because that's where you get your traffic. Near January the network upgrade at Limestonenetworks was still taking place which caused my bandwidth meter to stop working. This really scared me because I didn't want to get charged for overages due to the fact that my servers were receiving DDOS attacks, and I wouldn't know when to close the ports.
This incident actually turned out to be positive for me because even though I went over my bandwidth quota they didn't charge me for overages. I was very happy because this was like a late Christmas present, so now I was even more happy to give my money to Limestonenetworks. Now you might ask the question, how is this going downhill? Even though they didn't charge me for the overages, I still lost many clients who were angry at the fact that their game server were down.
In the end this network upgrade actually cost me 3 clients who were paying ~$60 per month. I let this slide because at this point I already had two servers with Limestonenetworks and I really didn't want to switch over due to the fact I would lose my IPs. The next month, February, was no different, I had more issues with Limestonenetworks. Starting of this month I was getting large DDOS attacks, which kept pushing my bandwidth over the quota, and I ended up paying close to $200 dollars just for bandwidth overages.
At this point they started to nickel and dime me for every single penny they could get of me. I don't know if they were having financial problems, or if it was due to another reason. Again in March I went over the quota, but at this time they told me that I had to pay per gigabyte which would result in a $500+ charge in bandwidth, and after talking with multiple agents, I was finally able to reach an agreement. They had changed a policy all of the sudden due to the fact that they knew I was a good customer and would keep paying for the overages.
The problem I had here was that I didn't mind upgrading to plan after I knew how much bandwidth was going to be used, since they don't offer any sort of DDOS protection, and game servers result in large DDOS attacks occasionally. I understand that Limestonenetworks was not at fault, but by making me pay per gigabyte was a bit harsh, since I had never been late on a payment, and had multiple servers. Try to remember that I stayed with this company even though I lost multiple clients because of their network outages, but they didn't care about this, all the care about is nickling and diming customers.
From that point on I have been living on the edge because I don't want to pay for an upgrade before hand due to the fact I don't know how much bandwidth my server will be using. Even if I upgrade to a different package it does not offer an insurance due to the fact that if I receieve a large DDOS than I orignally predicted, I would still end up paying per gigabyte.
This company has turned from having potential to just making their customers run away. Now the other problems I had with Limestonenetwork is the support they offer, which has been declining since I joined. The associates are very rude and don't really care about the customer's experience. I didn't include every problem I had with Limestonenetwork because it would make it a very long read.
Network - 10/10
Downtime - 5/10
Customer Service - 2/10
Overall Experience - 4/10
Would I recommend this company? NO, I urge everyone to stay away, unless they like to deal with problems on a daily basis.
Also from reading other topics on this forum, I personally believe that Limestonenetwork is overselling and their network can not handle the load.
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Sep 12, 2008
I've got high end server from WholeSaleinternet.I've been with Wholesaleinternet for 4 months now and I am extremely happy with them.Got an awesome server for a cheap price, a Quad-Core Xeon 8 Processor (3.0GHZ), 32GB RAM, 100mbit port link.
Support:
Sales support is slow but tech support is fast!
That you very much Aaron/Wholesaleinternet!, keep up the good work!
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May 1, 2009
I have been with virpus for the past 7 months
I have posted an review earlier as well for 2 month : 2 month review
Let me summarize my experience so far,
Technical Support - 10/10 Really fab. even though I was on semi-managed plan, they never made me feel I was on a semi it always felt as if I was under complete management, they did every task I had asked them to do, which I didn't get on any other semi-managed host earlier.
I have no sort of complaints about their technical team, they tried to solve some problems which were due to the billing dept.
The minimum response for a ticket generally around 10-15mins and the completion with in an hr.
Billing Dept - This is some dept. that has kept me in wonder-land. Some times the replies were so pleasing and most other times the tickets are ignored. From, almost 2nd r 3rd month, the billing dept. tickets don't get regularly replied and used to bump the tickets in order to get a response to the query. Which I got some how, in a apologizing manner (no complaints for that :p)
Now, for the past 1 month we have been having some serious problems.
First, I had recd. some black-listed ip's when we joined virpus, we failed to check them (mistake on our end agreed 100%), which probably even they might not have been aware of.. As, we had a minor mis-understanding with godaddy during domain registration, my friend registered the domain using one of our partner address who resides in Singapore, where as the registration was done from India. Godaddy, assumed this was a spam registration and refunded the amount. So, we had to register the domain through another partner who resided in India. Godaddy was cool after we gave them the complete details, where they wanted some ID proof, and we provided them.
Our ip was on the black-list, we thought since our domain was spam-listed for a day, (until godaddy took it off) it made the hosts to assume the domain was black-listed, so we had manually submitted forms and proofs to most of the anti-spam agencies and mail providers, where they took the ban off the ip with in 15-20 days after we joined virpus.
Our domain was no longer under black-list, but ip was still under black-listed in some sites, such as rediff, it took more than 2 months to set the things straight at rediff, where we did some config added from the tech.dept. such as setting up spf record, and did a few tweaks here and there.
Even after making all these efforts, our ip was still under black-list of some ISP's. Our main domain (the domain which was under bl list earlier) loads well for every user, but our child domains where we have blogs and other activities do not load for lots of users. The ping results in the internet gives 100% but on their particular systems it gives no ping. Some times, the site loads wierdly such as,[url] might load but [url]might not load, and vice-versa, some times local ping fails but site loads, its all wierd and we found the reason to the problem to be ip after some minor confirmation from our end. We were losing our revenue of more than 60% just because of the failure of loading on the site, the tech. dept used to ask the ips which are facing prob to check if they are blocked, but its not possible to give ips of users who visit as guests and others, we have noted reports on other sites that our site wasn't loading for them. We still were able to give few ips for check and found them not-blocked on the ip. The sites are able to be viewed for all from proxy sites such as stage6.info but we can't ask each viewer to go to proxy site to view if they are unable to load, it will become ridiculous and we might lose our entire traffic some day.
We had shifted our domains temporarily to other vps where we noted none of the users had a single complaint, we were there for more than a week, which ensured the problem was not the domains but the ips, again after returning to the virpus hosts, we had created 3 tickets to sales/billing dept. to issue fresh ip's, got 0 reply and mailed to mr.Ken using : kenneth.odem@virpusnetworks.net got no reply after 48hrs.
We have to agreee, Earlier,mr.Ken was so helpful he helped us when we didn't have any funds to issue, since we had an dispute with an item where our payment was delayed by paypal. So, we had paid them almost 10 days later than the due date where mr.Ken was so helpful and saw to it our VPS could stay online despite the payments not been released.
In thanks, we had directly mailed our check we got from an ad-agency, which again made around 5-10 days in the payment, which made our balance stand in the positive note, we have our balance in the account for the past 3 months so that there are no dues left.
But, in the past 1 -2 months the replies have been disappointing.
We planned to leave virpus and join other host, where we burnt our hands, we looked for other reputed VPS and had a few in mind after our staff suggested few good organizations(don't prefer to name them here as it would be mis-leading).
Since, virpus wasn't ready to refund the amount in the credits we decided to continue with virpus atleast as a sideby host. Later, some how our members suggested we used virpus as a main host, so we wanted fresh ip's to get rid of the damn problem we are having but we have recd. no response for the past 1 week.
Now, lately after the maintenance our VPS was down for approx. 26-27hrs on april 25th Saturday, where our traffic is usually on the weekends. We lost the compelete traffic and revenue. When we asked if it come under credits, we got response as : This was the result of scheduled maintenance we cannot, it would not qualify under our SLA. (just giving the main result statment off the entire reply recd. from sales). Its some thing we would like to regret but for sure this isn't some issue, which could make us think to get to a new host.
The reply from the sales dept. has made our staff making funny betting, as one would win if we get a reply and other would if its not replied with in 48hrs, lately the first one is winning () due to lack of communication.
This might be our last month. Our next due date major amount would be taken from the credits, so a very little amount would exist in the account. We will stay with them until our amount with them is spent.
We had enjoyed really good with the tech. dept but the sales dept has been really poor in the recent past. I am forced to say this as even after mailing we haven't got response where, mr.Ken stated if our tickets were lost or some thing, mail to him but either didn't work so far.
Once, earlier when we requested for change of ips we were said some $7 or some thing would be charged for the swap, when we made other enquiries about it we didn't get a response till date
My tickets which lay un-responded:
203497
509467
385781
509467 and 385781 are double-post of the ticket, but got reply for none of the above tickets. Was expecting a reply for 1 atleast.
I was ready to pay excess charge for the new ips as there some mistake from my end in failure to check the ips before getting them but I wanted some concession as the major mistake was from their end while dispatching ips. I am not refusing to pay but I wanted the concession, got no reply and the above tickets are a proof of them.
Our staff online time and their live chat time don't tally, so we can't make any contact to them on live as well.
I am not sure if this is mis-understanding or what, but it has been a mixed experience for me. For sure, their sales crew have to be increased that's some suggestion I would strongly do.
I can recommend this host to any one for the tech. support they provide but can't guarantee them for the sales dept. replies based on my past/recent experiences.
Totally my site down for around ~30hrs including all the maintanence and other reasons, it could be a bit less but I am rounding it off, for sure its more than 28hrs
My over all rating: 7.5/10
Tech. Dept - 10/10
Sales/Billing Dept - 5/10
my site submitted for review via report feature
I tried to give all my experience on virpus and I am not against any one for joining virpus nor have any fights with virpus team.
May be if we get response from sales we might still consider continuing with virpus but that stands low at the moment.
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Dec 15, 2008
First off they did not setup my server for nearly 2 days. I bitched and was apologized about that. They said I would get 10% off my next month.
I proceed to get everything running and start setting up my domains and then blamo its gone! It was reset they said even though I did not have a remote switch. I asked them why they did that and they insisted it was me. Whatever. So I setup everything again and was getting horrible speeds for my photography site. The hell???? They promised me the world when I signed up with them. I also got to deal with "outsourced tech support" from india that was not helpful.
I finally get things running but its still a slow *** server and they try to tell me I needed to upgrade to a much faster plan and get a better processor and memory. I tell them screw that they are throttling my bandwidth. Like memory and processor are gonna make a difference for 3 websites 1 with forums and 1 for photography then my personal site.
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