[TriLUG] Hosting Services w/ Ipower

[Wade Bowlin]

I just thought I'd share a good experience with a VPS hosting company.
 A few months back I had a CentOS VPS with http://www.rimuhosting.com
and I only have good things to say about their service.  Scheduled
maintenance outages were always announce, unplanned ones were always
disclosed (power supply failure for example) and trouble
tickets/requests were always handled quickly.  They tend to be a few
dollars more per month than some but the service was worth it.  Oh...
I got a very lean, but fully functional (yum) install too.  As always
ymmv.

- Wade

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 10:20 AM, Brian Phelps <brphelps at ieee.org> wrote:
> 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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