[TriLUG] Hosting Services w/ Ipower

Brian Phelps brphelps at ieee.org
Sat Apr 12 10:20:29 EDT 2008


Hi All
Our website is hosted on a stripped Red Hat Linux VPS by Ipower.  By
stripped I mean there is no package manager, and certain basic utilities
are conveniently missing.

We were originally on a shared BSD host.  We complained to them about
poor uptime (one of the many shared host accounts get hacked every so
often) and they suggested a VPS would be more stable.  

In the last 4 months since the move to a VPS:

1st problem
No package manager.  WTF?  I asked them where the package manager is and
they point me to some BS GUI on the Plesk interface for installing Plesk
modules.  They tell me I must pay more for these "modules"  They
evidently don't really know what I am talking about. 

2nd problem
It took me a week after I moved the content and set everything up to get
Ipower tech support to understand that the reverse dns entry is on their
servers, not mine, and they needed to fix it because I could not.
Reverse DNS entries allow our mail server to avoid being completely
blocked by spam fighting tactics.

3rd problem
Within about a month they randomly dropped the reverse DNS entry for our
IP address.  This takes several days to explain to them and finally
resolve.  I can't have our email down for this long dammit.

4th problem
As of today the host has been completely down for a solid 24 hours,
supposedly to fix a RAM problem.  I have called their techsupport 5
times now, they tell me it will be up soon each time.  

The idea behind using a VPS, I thought is that it can be moved to
another machine quickly with minimal loss of service.  They treat me as
though their crappy server is worth more to them than my VPS uptime.
Servers are a dime a dozen.  My business relies on my mail server. Move
my VPS to another server and fix the machine later guys. This makes me
think I am dealing with incompetence.  

Thanks for reading my crazy rants.  All of this is 100% true.  My
conclusions are what you make of them however.  I hope I saved someone
on this list some headache by avoiding Ipower.  

-Brian Phelps




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