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.
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.
well I have been with imountain now since 11/01/07 and they still are by far the best hosting company I have ever been with.
I started on a simple clustered shared plan, moved to their clustered semi-dedicated plan and now am on my own dedicated server (opteron 246 with 4GB of RAM). my server runs a wordpress blog that last wednesday night had 868 concurrent connections and ran as smooth as if there were only 10 concurrent connections. WP-Cache, xCache and memcache (huge server) are utilized as well as offloading images to steadyoffload.com
uptime
There were a couple of issues in the past but nothing major for me. The MYSQL outage didn't affect me as I wasn't on the house database server cluster that went down. there are the occasional issues for a few minutes here and there but nothing major at all.
Hyperspin show my uptime 99.891% since January (there was a large DDOS attack in there).
I can live with that considering I have failover in that if the imountain server goes offline a splash page from another hosting account(In UK) shows up within 3 minutes stating the server is offline and will be back up soon. When imountain comes back online within 3 minutes the splash page is gone and my blog shows again.
support
This is imountain's strongest aspect IMO. Their support is very knowledgeable, fast and even will help with 3rd party scripts. The have helped me setup a couple of custom things, always answer my questions with personal responses, not canned messages and always get issues solved.
They also have phone support which I have used once just to ask them about an issue real quick. For me email support is better.
price
I can't go into this topic much for certain reasons but their prices IMO are competitive.
con's
HSPERE control panel which takes some getting used to. I have it mastered now but when I first signed up I was lost as hell.
what i would like to see
I would love to see a customer forum. At one point they said they were going to install one but at this point nothing has come of it.
If they don't want to do a forum, I would like to see more updates on their blog when issues arise.
Still would like to see support sign the names to support tickets so I know who is who. if the support ticket does have a name it is always imountain.com not the techs name.
I never, ever thought that I would ever have to write an 18 month review of a webhost ... but here I am. That is because, quite simply; I have never stayed with a web hosting company before for over a year, until now.
Technically my 18 month anniversary is February 5th; but since I have been quite busy with other projects; I thought I would use the bit of free time that I do have right now to post the review. So here it is.
- - - - - -
THE GOOD: iMountain is still there (obviously). Their servers remain fast; and so does the network. There was the network outage in late October 2008; and the router failure a couple a week or two ago; but other than that things have been rock solid *knock on wood*. I am lucky to be on a fast server where people rarely; if ever; bog it down.
Also, Brandon and his crew continue to keep up a mostly top notch level of support.
They have been a bit slower than in the past to respond; but I suspect that is because they are getting busier and growing. It comes with the territory, I suppose.
THE BAD: Communication (as noted above) has been a tad worse than in the past. I am not 100% sure if that is their fault or not; but I wish that it could be improved, if possible. But I do appreciate the fact that we got a nice discount off of our next bill for the major network outage that happened in October 2008.
I’ve had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I’ve concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I’ve used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).
Summary Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum
Pre-sales and pricing I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=649322), which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.
Migration Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don’t offer to do the migration for you and I didn’t yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.
Support Support quality is definitely one of iMountain’s strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It’s all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I’ve experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They’re also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it’s worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There’s no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There’s a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they’re barely used.
Speed Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I’ve only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they’ve all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "…we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we’re here to make sure your visitors get through…". So far I haven’t tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].
Reliability I’ve been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year [url] and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I’m a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I’m still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host.
Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.
File permission issues Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can’t subsequently be modified or removed by it. It’s a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It’s all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.
An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it’s no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.
Certificates I found that iMountain’s security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven’t encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you’re planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I’ve simply gone back to unencrypted connections.
E-Mail Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I’ve had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail.
There’s no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.
Control panel The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don’t work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.
Backups There’s no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).
Solar power The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.
I've had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I've concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I've used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).
Summary Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum Pre-sales and pricing I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see [url] [url],which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.
Migration Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don't offer to do the migration for you and I didn't yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.
Support Support quality is definitely one of iMountain's strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It's all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I've experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They're also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it's worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There's no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There's a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they're barely used.
Speed Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I've only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they've all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "...we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we're here to make sure your visitors get through...". So far I haven't tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].
Reliability I've been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year [url] and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I'm a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I'm still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host. Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.
File permission issues Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can't subsequently be modified or removed by it. It's a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It's all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.
An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it's no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.
Certificates I found that iMountain's security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven't encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you're planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I've simply gone back to unencrypted connections.
E-Mail Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I've had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail. There's no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.
Control panel The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don't work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.
Backups There's no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).
Solar power The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.
Feel free to move this post to another place, I couldn't find a place to put webhost reviews. Been running around and am just now getting to my review of them... Its been about 9 months since I got my account at imountain.com and they've been great. I'm always updated on any scheduled downtimes, and even unexpected downtimes (crashes/hardware failure etc.). There has been only one occasion where my site went down during the middle of the day, some user foolishly created a poor SQL statement and it dropped the server. This was fixed within 2 hours and we were back online.
My site only has ~50 users so its low load, other than that one time everyone is happy with it.
Imountain.com's support staff have been more than excellent, they've answered all my questions quickly and with detail. The only downside (for me) is that since I'm not on a VPS I don't have any shell access but its understandable for security reasons so its not a big deal and it was expected on my part.
I'm a fairly technical person, work about 95% of the time in a linux desktop and server environment and am used to having shell access to our servers to do maintenance so the web maintenance was a bit different but easy to use too. All together though, great prices, great service and great support staff. I think I'll be keeping my account at imountain.com and not moving.
I have an account with iMountain since August 2007 and have nothing but good things to say about them.
First, when I signed up I used one of their coupons that were available back then and signed up for solarcluster3.
I also had time to test their VPS for a few months but got back to solarcluster, didn't had too much time to manage the VPS.
Uptime: in one year I had about 3 outages, two small ones and the bigger one that some of you know about when their MySQL cluster crashed (I got compensated for this). We all know downtime is inevitable and I'm very happy on how they managed the issue. Looking forward to another year with this kind of uptime. Over 99.9+ overall.
Support: they are very fast to reply and fix issues, take backups of your account or do some custom php settings / installs. I really feel they are holding my hand here.
I'm currently using 2.3GB of space and in some (good) months I use over 150GB transfer. Sometimes I have over 200 visitors online on my wordpress blogs. All sites load very fast, no load issues etc.
I only signed up to test them out (for 1 month, 1 year ago) but they are just too good and I feel very comfortable with them.
I have my main sites there so I'm looking forward for at least one more year with them.
If there's anything else you guys want to know, just ask
During the past 24 hours, two things have happened with iMountain.com that I wanted to let you all know about.
1. I uncovered a bug in the Webshell application that they use (bundled with Hsphere) which was preventing me from gzipping up my and my buddy's owsweather.com site for weekly backups. Reported it in an email, and in 2 minutes I had a reply back saying that they would notify Hsphere of the issue since it's a bug in the software. Good job there.
2. The big one is that the same owsweather.com site is getting clobbered by HUGE amounts of traffic - more than we ever have in our 8 year history. We have received over 2500 unique IP visits since midnight (it is now 5 minutes until 6:00 am PDT in California).
I must give major props to iMountain for building rock solid servers which don't bog down under high traffic load, and also for allowing us to "use" their servers for what they are INTENDED to be used for! If it wasn't for them and allowing our site to have bursts of traffic like this *see Dreamhost, Bluehost, and other similar reviews*, we would be in a very tight spot indeed. So thanks Brandon and crew. You have done us well.
Didn't write a review last month cause I didn't feel the need to, but I will this month.
Main reason being because I am going on vacation from June 1st to the 5th, and my payments are due on the 5th day of the month. So I call iMountain and Brandon picked up. He was happy to inform me that it would not be a problem if I paid a day or two late so that I could get back from my vacation and get settled first without having to go "omgz I need to feed iMountain!"
Also, I have had absolutely zero downtime in the past 2 months since the mySQL server cluster RAID fault. Now that I said that, they will have downtime. (Joking) Thank god I backup nightly. Anyway, the databases are MUCH faster now since they upgraded the cluster, no complaints there.
The support staff continue to be very helpful (as always), especially the night crew.
Don't usually email / call during the day unless it's to talk to Brandon. Must be since I'm a night owl.
I have been with iMountain.com for 8 months now and I wanted to give a quick followup on my progress with them.
Personally I can't say anything bad about these guys. They are truly a top notch operation on all levels. I started my busy American Idol blog out on a shared account and moved on to their managed luxury cluster in February and all I can say is wow. They propelled my blog through the entire season of Idol with little in the way of issues. Because of there service, help and expertise I was able to sustain 700 concurrent connections when David Cook was crowned the winner of season 7.
Uptime - there have been a couple of issues over the months, both of the big ones were discussed here but all outages were handled with great professionalism. Timely emails with updates were sent out and the problems were fixed with little downtime. The latest mysql outage didn't affect me since I have a dedicated mysql server. I did have a fairly serious DDoS attack over a period of 5 days that affected downtime but I was moved to a different server when all other options failed.
Support - These guys are fabulous. They have went above the call of duty at all hours of the day and night answering all of my requests for help. Believe me there have been a lot of support tickets. Mind you 99% of these were just for help on something and not really related to a problem with my hosting account that affected service. (Stating that so people don't think there is an issue with the hosting at iMountain)
Not to mention these guys are great at helping with 3rd party products. How many other support companies will attempt to help you with an issue with your wordpress or gallery install? None that I have ever had. I give them a huge thanks for all of that.
Price - You get what you pay for. iMountain may be a little more expensive with their shared and luxury clusters than some of those oversellers out there but you are getting a great service with these guys. Searching the forums will also find you some discounts you can apply to save a little money.
There is actually so much more I could say about these guys but I think from this review and the other ones floating around the forums that you get the idea that these guys mean business.
honestly I have tried various other hosting options in the past few Idol season from shared at surpass, dedicated at surpass and whatever you call mosso but I have found my home till the day my blog is taken offline. I truly won't be able to find anyone as dedicated to me and my blog as the fellows at iMountain. They take great pride in their service and for that I am truly thankful.
link is in my signature for verification that I am hosted on iMountain.
I forgot to write a 10 month review so here is my (almost) 11 month review.
GOOD: Support continues to be as fast as ever. I received a reply to one of my tickets the other day in under a minute. Must be a record. Also, the servers continue to fly along at lightning speed, as does their internet connection.
BAD: Only downtime since my last review occurred when their mySQL cluster server borked on June 1st and crashed. Other than that, mostly everything has been doing pretty good.
RECOMMENDATION: Solar power rules. Support is fast, efficient, and friendly. The servers are mostly reliable; but the hSphere panel can be a bit cumbersome for newcomers. Overall, I give iMountain a 9.9 / 10, or an A+ rating.
Next month I will write a better review as on August 5th will be my 1 year anniversary with them (a first with any host with me! )
I haven't got time to spend forever comparing hosts, so i had a quick look around and saw good things said about imountain and medialayer.
I bought a wordpress blog which is currently doing 75k uniques per month (probably not much in the scheme of things). I am aim to buy or build several more blogs of this size plus a couple of ecommerce stores.
I think as per 1 good review i saw of imountain, that either host would probably do, but can anyone offer some advice of if speed is significantly different between either of them or if there is any other reason i might be swayed either way?
I needed more control over my aplications (needed SSH, eaccelerator) and I upgraded from their Solar Cluster 3 to their 512RAM emeraldVPS.
Let me tell you the setup that these guys have rules in every way.
The only thing that runs on the VPS is Apache so you might have an idea that this may perform better in some aplications than most 1GB RAM dedicated servers that also run MySQL, mail and other services ...at a fraction of the price. MySQL, mail and dns runs on their clusters. I installed zend and eaccelerator, and now my busy Romanian blog (with wpcache) runs in 82MB RAM
I'm going to move 90% of my sites there, I have lots of space and resources to grow.
According to cpuinfo I also benefit from 8 of these:
CPU model name:
Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 865
The support guys have always been fair and square to me, they answered fast to all my questions (mostly less than 10 minutes), moved my sites on the VPS and told me what's good and what's not so good about their VPS (yes, they told me without asking them about the minor "inconvenience" I may have with the VPS before I bought it). I feel they are the kind of guys you would love going to parties and drinking beer with.
I recently changed providers after a short search, including input from this thread [url].
I opted to go with a semi-dedicated package from Iron Mountain ( www.imountain.com ). I was mostly impressed with their clustered solution and dedicated mySQL servers to host our increasingly busy Vbulletin forums. They also answered email inquires very quickly; another good sign, given the few comments I could find about them at WHT.
While I was intrigued about the solar-powered claim, I knew that many in our community would appreciate that aspect as well.
Ultimately, I wasn't quite convinced our forum issues were mainly related to CPU/memory resource use. So, I narrowed my search to providers that also claimed to have a good setup for SQL. These included Cartika Hosting and MediaLayer, among others (Thank you to all who responded with input and offers!). At that point, it came down to lowest price and iMountain's offer was also in the upper end of the price range supported by recent member donations. In case I was wrong about the CPU resources, at least this would at least allow some time to save for the dedicated solution that many recommended.
As it turns out, the CPU/memory resources were not the issue at all. It seems that our forum issues at the previous provider were primarily due to their SQL implementation.
In fact, they were going to generously allow us to continue on our $50/year plan for a while given that we weren't yet hogging resources. Nonetheless, the slowdowns and SQL errors continued until the last day. In any case, I can still recommend AddAction.net for anyone looking for a competitively priced basic hosting package if you don't have major SQL requirements. It was inexpensive, but I believe I got a lot more than I paid for.
Since the switch, the forums have been running great. No slowdowns, no freezes, no infinite waits to read/make a post, no flood of SQL error email messages. Most importantly, no user complaints so far. In addition, I've been told that we aren't even putting a scratch in our resource allocations in any area and there should be plenty of room for growth that has been doubling about every 6 months for the last few years.
The transfer was quick and the switchover had minimal downtime given that the new plan included a dedicated IP address for me to direct users of the forums during the DNS propagation. There were a couple minor issues during the switch, but their tech support team responded very quickly. They also helped setup a memcache for the forums and suggested some other tweaks to further improve performance.
Overall, I am very satisfied so far. I'll report again in a couple months when I have a better feel for downtime and more time for users to comment.
I am in the market for a VPS to act as a slave node to a distributed nagios setup I am setting up for myself.
Browsing the vps forums I came across Imountain. They sounded 'unique' to me, because of the solar power they claim to use to power their servers etc.
There was no test ip listed so I just traced their domain imountain.com and the subdomain cp.imountain.com (which is their hsphere control panel server I am assuming) which pointed to: 76.79.76.100.. A traceroute of this shows business grade road runner.
Quote:
traceroute to 76.79.76.100 (76.79.76.100), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 ev1s-207-218-205-161.ev1servers.net (207.218.205.161) 0.805 ms 0.719 ms 0.719 ms 2 gphou2-209-85-1-6.ev1servers.net (209.85.1.6) 0.377 ms 0.311 ms 0.328 ms 3 gphou2-209-85-0-5.ev1servers.net (209.85.0.5) 0.331 ms 0.404 ms 0.316 ms 4 g0-10.na21.b015619-0.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com (38.99.215.153) 7.110 ms 7.031 ms 6.768 ms 5 g4-1-1-3827.core01.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com (66.28.65.109) 6.825 ms 6.843 ms 6.803 ms 6 t4-1.mpd01.iah01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.2.202) 7.151 ms 6.893 ms 7.055 ms 7 t2-3.mpd01.lax01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.186) 51.286 ms 36.483 ms 42.640 ms MPLS Label=1057 CoS=5 TTL=1 S=0 8 t3-4.mpd01.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.3.142) 36.344 ms 36.492 ms 36.660 ms 9 adelphia.lax05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.11.46) 46.306 ms 46.374 ms 46.499 ms 10 ae-2-0.c0.lax91.twc-core.net (66.109.3.129) 46.644 ms 46.882 ms 46.878 ms 11 66.109.3.174 (66.109.3.174) 36.356 ms 39.534 ms 39.423 ms 12 tge7-1.bwlaca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com (66.75.161.202) 42.348 ms tge7-2.bwlaca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com (76.166.1.22) 39.154 ms tge7-1.bwlaca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com (66.75.161.202) 42.387 ms 13 tge8-3.lsanca2-rtr1.socal.rr.com (76.166.1.1) 42.985 ms 42.935 ms 42.802 ms 14 tge9-4.covnca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com (76.166.1.51) 40.246 ms 40.087 ms 40.146 ms 15 tge9-1.pomnca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com (76.166.1.53) 43.759 ms 43.880 ms 40.578 ms 16 cpe-76-166-3-210.socal.rr.com (76.166.3.210) 46.036 ms 43.782 ms 40.713 ms 17 rrcs-76-79-76-100.west.biz.rr.com (76.79.76.100) 44.086 ms !<10> 43.934 ms !<10> 43.985 ms !<10>
Now thinking to my self, I wouldn't host anything on road runner. Its not a reliable provider in my opinion.
question: Does road runner offer 1gbit/10gbit fiber links?
I decided to drive down there since its only ~30 miles away. I was actually pretty amazed by this. Its in the middle of nowhere really. There is a gas station, a motel, their building, and a ride share. I don't see how fiber would be economical in this location unless they pulled some from devry university which is further up the road.
Speaking of ride share, its pretty funny the google & yahoo maps show the ride share as their location on areal photos.
So I went down there and took these pictures, they are not the best since I was in my silverado and all I had was my camera phone.
Proof of address: [url]
Another from the front: [url]
From the freeway side (i went back and took this one after i left): [url]
There was no apparent solar panels on the ground level, which leaves me to believe they were on the roof, from the ground in my truck I couldn't see any on the roof so I cannot confirm that.
The questions that remain are this:
1.) Is there solar panels? and with a building that size how many would be needed to sustain it?
2.) Are they using road runner to host? If so does road runner do 1gbit fiber links?... that HAS to be pricey if they do.
3.) How secure is that building? It looks like a pretty basic office building.
4.) Air conditioning? Does that building have ample cooling?
These things I would never know because they do not allow tours of the facility.
Does any one have an vps with an Ip I can traceroute? I am curious to their network setup as they are very vague on it.
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).
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.
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...
Well I have to say to begin with, I never expected to be with one provider for so long. My sites are low volume enough that it would be a waste for a full dedicated server, but I wanted the control that a VPS provided.
Four or five years ago, when I first started trying to find a VPS, I floundered. Fpund more problems, and slow unreliable servers. I averaged about 3 host a year during that time. It was at this time I started reading about XEN, and the concept of it's method of virtualzation intrigued me, so I started searching for a host that offered this type of VPS.
My first experience was a big let down. Not really sure what the problem was, and cannot remember the name of the host, but that server was extremely slow.
It was then that I came to WHT and found the VPS offers here. There I saw an offer by ServerDave, signed up only to find there was a waiting list for new VPS. It originally took about a week (to my initial disappointment) to get provisioned. The VPS had 1 gig of ram allocated that was almost unheard of at the time. As soon as I started setting up I could tell the difference in speed and responsiveness.
I did have one problem, contacted support about it, and it was fixed within a couple of hours. Turned out to be a php misconfiguration. That was the last problem I ever had with my VPS. All my other contacts with support has just been a few general questions, and of course once to upgrade to a new VPS (newer OS) wich they provided me more than enough time to complete my move.
For most of the time, the only graphs they offered were network graphs, but just recently they have performed an upgrade and the graphs now chart - cpu - disk utilization - along with the network charts. For a control panel I chose DirectAdmin, which I now love. And 5 dollars a month is a great price for it.
Uptime has been terrific. In my three years, my server has only gone down about four or five times for a short time. These all were for upgrades that was well announced before the downtime which was usually just a system reboot for a kernel update.
I use CentOS, and they do auto yum updates which makes it nice. I update my server software manually through directadmins custombuild scripts.
They do have another control panel for auto OS reloads, but this of course does not install your control panel. This is why when I moved from CentOS 4 to CentOS 5 they provisioned another VPS for me (free of charge).
All in all this company has been a pleasure to work with. I look forward to the next 3 years with them.
Just wanted to give a short review of WebTHosting, an offshore hosting company.I am with them more than 6 months.
SO far the greatest hosting service I ever had. WebT Hosting is fairly affordable, with fast and reliable networks, and great support. Their uptime and server load is quite satisfactory.
One most important and the best thing is their live support and sales service. also the response of their support ticket is really fast.
I'd been with hivelocity for 14 months by now and i'm thinking to continue my bussines on there.
I created a thread on the past, this is the thread:
[url]
And this is what i said:
Quote:
What can i say?
They just Rock, Dave and steve are just great.
Dave is my account manager he is helpfull, quickly and very efficient.
i would like to recommend people to join in hivelocity.
They are just more than fine, my server is working great and i had 2 issues resolved.
1 issue in less than 20 mins (another server in the rack was consuming a lot of bandwith) the other issue was a little more complicated but it has been resolved too, thanks Dave
They have the same problem with support than sharktech (not managed), but if you talk to your account manager or Steve they will take care of it and get the problem resolved in a few minuts, that's just cool.
Service and support for me was really good in one week with they .. i will stay for a long time here if everything goes right.
and if we can, stablish a long term business based on trust (i'm a coder i can help)
Well from that moment to now i can say the following things:
No downtimes, only schedules (maintenence)
No support problems.
I upgraded my server to a quad2core and for 6 months payment, they gove me a second HDD!
I'm sending new customers to hivelocity right now, and trying to start reselling their servers.
¿why do i want to?
Because Steve and Dave, are responsable guys.
Because Network works fine.
Last server i bought for a customer: 1 day setup, no problems. I did a hardware check and it was OK, no HDD failures and TEMPERATURE was the right.
Because they understand if you have a problem.
Because support is there to help, even if you don't pay for "Managed services"
And i think that, they manage customers as well, that you can feel as a part of the company and not just another Argentinian customer.
So, watching the huge financial crisis, i want to give a good review about this company, and try to get more and new customers to they.
I would highly recommend to buy their services, this is not another company this is one of the best companies i ever knew.
This is my first review regarding a dedicated server prodiver, so forgive me if i miss anything.
We are a small web hosting company located in Greece and after many years in a Greek Datacenter, we were seeking for a reliable provider with Managed Dedicated servers. After a lot of search here in WHT, we came through ServerBoost which is located in Holland.
Sales: Jelle was very patient during our talks, although we were just researching at the time being. A really nice guy and a true professional, answered all my questions as I was skeptic regarding the migration, or details of our contract and service. ( personal fears :p )
Support: They say the first impression is the most significant and I must admit that mine was pretty good. Starting from the Server migration ( From 2 old/slow servers to a brand-new Dell one. ) which went really smoothly from ServerBoost part, taking the downtime to minimal time!
Our SLA contract has a specific time window for support requests but it hardly takes over some minutes or 1-2 hours to get a response ( regarding the time of the day of course! ) and Jelle is always there when i need to ask something.
Hardware/Network: Our Dell server is running really good, and the network is really reliable as "promised". Good speeds and ping ( from Greece ) which is important for our customers.
Conclusion: For me, having dealt with only one foreign company in the past for hosting ( US ), ServerBoost is the ideal one to do business with, because they look really "caring" about our business and their flexibility is priceless.
I'm looking forward using ServerBoost for a long time, really satisfied! :-)
I would just like to say that they surprise me for a shared host.
Support: 10/10
Uptime: 9/10
Speed: 9.5/10
Value: 8/10
Although I pay quite a bit I still think it's worth it. About $15/mth for 15GB HDD and 75GB transfer. My website handles ~300K hit's daily with only a few hiccups. It's uptime is something like 99.97% which is decent. The only big incident is when I first signed up I was transferring my domain which took a few days, but was resolved professionally. So far it's a big thumbs up.
Decided to give a VPS a try back in November. Ordered through one the sales advertised in the offer forums, got set-up in less than 12 hours.
In terms of performance, the VPS works fine.
In terms of service, this is where the ball is dropped.
The issue is that they set me up in LA, and I'm on the East coast. So I've contacted support, asking if a move was possible. When they said yes, and I've confirmed that their offer to move it during the night was fine, I've even shut everything down to make things smoother.
The next morning, I receive an email telling me I will get another one once it's done... the following day, I receive an email that it can't be done, as I have a x64 OS and there is no space on the node.
So I let this slide, and decide that sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and decided to offer them to BUY another one, this time on the East coast, if they could offer me the same setup as I have on the West coast. They've agreed, and I did the order as they requested... That was around noon 2 days ago, and still nothing today...
For another example, I've requested a ticket because the /dev/tun wasn't configured properly in the container... I don't know what they did, but it corrupted my VPS so bad that I have to re-initialise it completly. Another example: I've posted a ticket that their gentoo image is faulty (no network support at all!), and to my knowledge this was still not fixed.
So yes, NYNOC has some cool ideas like an online chat, even offered an EYEOS desktop, forums, tips, and great prices... but for me now this ain't worth it much and will be canceling my accounts. I guess coming from VPSFarm has spoiled me (instant setup, quick support), and will be looking for a new provider.
I used 15 days of godaddy's shared hosting before FsckVPS. Due to unexpected traffic, I had to move to a VPS. So I chose FsckVPS's 512mb packet.
I was very sattisfied with them. Their servers were fast and the VPS got setup in just a few seconds.
The hacking incident happened this month. I was still pleased by the way they handled it. So I decided to stay with them. They decided to give 2 months free after the hacking incident.
2. Month and 3. Month
Everything was very smooth, running perfectly. Servers were still fast after I got switched to a new one after the hacking.
4. Month
This is the second time I paid to FsckVPS and I was pretty happy about it.
Then I have been informed that they will be switching servers. They told that it would take around 4 hours per vps.
So when I noticed that my vps was down for the first time, I didn't react and waited. After being down for about 8 hours, I sent them a ticket. The response came after 4 hours saying that it was now online.
I logged in to my vps and the first thing I noticed was how SLOW it was. After a while, it crashed and I couldn't reach to my vps anymore. I sent a ticket, they reset the server, it got a little better.
This happened about 4 times. Everytime I sent a ticket asking why this is happening, I only received a response saying it is OK now.
After 3 weeks of being like this, I decided to switch to a new VPS provider.
Now I am on my new VPS provider, hoping for better results.
My fsckvps will expire in 4 days and it is still very slow.
After having a dedicated server for more than 70 days from WiredTree.com, I thought that it would be a good time for a review.
I came across them through good reviews in this forum and took the opportunity to get one of their special offers (Core i7). As a short summary in advance: I can fully recommend them to anyone seeking a managed dedicated box.
Sales: I just had contact to Sales twice - Once as I tried to bargain for an even cheaper offer than the special one they already had (without success, by the way) and a second time when it came to an eventual server upgrade. Response time was quick, the answers were professional and friendly and there is nothing I could complain about.
Server Setup: I was in a totally different time-zone than WiredTree while ordering the server. As they have the practice to call their new customers for identity verification, the call reached me at night time and I could not pick it up. So I called them in the morning and they called me back again. It must have been deepest night time in Chicago at this moment. From this telephone call on, it took less than 2-3 hours (as far as I remember) until the server was ready and online. Another thing is their "ServerShield Server Hardening" that they perform before you get the box. I never received a dedicated server before with so many tweaking measures taken in advance. MySQL performance was improved, the firewall was well configured, security checks were already made, everything felt fine-tuned in advance. So, again, very good job done by WiredTree.
Hardware Quality: You might say: "You've only been with them 70+ days. Of course, there was no hardware problem during that short time". Well, I read here at WHT about customers of other hosts who had the first failures already at the moment they received the new box. So - No hardware problems at all until now.
Support: I am not very experienced in server management and tend to get nervous if something doesn't work and support takes more than 30min. to answer questions. I know that this makes me annoying sometimes, but at least I always try to be friendly. Fortunately, WiredTree seems very good prepared for nerve-wrackers like me... Support never took more than 15min. to answer my requests and in at least 2 cases, they even bent backwards to help me with problems that had nothing to do with them. Every single request got solved in a very short time. I contacted support at the most unusable hours of the day because I often travel between different time zones - They were always there, like an own IT-Crowd in your pocket. Two thumbs up for their support staff.
Network: 100% Uptime during the whole time. No hickups at all, no problem that I would be aware of. Fine speed all the time. There is really nothing negative that I could say.
Billing: No billing issues at all. Everything worked correctly.
Their customer portal "Grove": Well. Hmmm. Okay, one thing first: I saw several customer portals during the last 10 years. And none of them blew me away. I haven't seen SoftLayer's yet and was told that theirs should be even nicer than grandmas cheese cake, but the grass is always greener on the other side as long as you have never been there. Let's say that "Grove" is surely one of the better and nicer looking customer portals around. It bundles a lot of information and offers a good way of communication. The rest is a question of taste...
The bad news: I cancelled the server today. The company I work for has rent several servers at another host and paid them 1 year in advance. One is totally unused (great planning, MnMgt!) and I was offered by my boss to use it cost-free for that period of time. Well, this is an opportunity I have to take... Saving $300 a month is quite a lot of money. But I am determined to go back to WiredTree as soon as my "free time" is over.
