NOTE: This does not affect Dedicated Server clients.

We will be moving to a major upgrade of our HSphere system this weekend. Our planned maintenance window will be 10PM-4AM Pacific/California Time. If everything works well, you probably won’t notice more than 30 minutes of down-time but we have a large window just in case.

Please make any backups of your sites and databases in the next few days.

Your server will not be down the entire time but we have to update quite a few servers so there’s a good chance you will experience some intermittent connectivity issues.

For sure, these servers will be down for 30 minutes:

1) All mySQL clusters. If you use any of the mysqlxxx.imountain.com clusters, you will experience 30 minutes of down-time for the upgrade somewhere between 10PM and 4AM.

2) The cp.imountain.com Control panel server will be down for 30 minutes.

3) Mail clusters should be down about 15 minutes each.

4) Webservers will probably NOT be down. We will not be updating the webservers (most likely).

Changes you will notice after the updates:

1) HSphere Control panel skin will look different; however, the old skin is still selectable if you prefer. The new control Panel looks more like “Plesk” or “HSPComplete” if you’re familiar with those.

2) Apache 2.2 will be available on a separate server which you can move to if you wish. Apache 2.2 will be our standard webserver offering moving forward.

3) Ruby on Rails support will also be available on the Apache 2.2 servers.

4) The mySQL clusters will be fully replicated and backed up with a live backup server: 1 replication cluster + 1 backup server with data 3 hours behind. This is probably one of the most fault-tolerant mySQL solutions you can find in a public hosting environment.

5) We will be changing our naming and our logos from “Iron Mountain Hosting” to “iMountain.com”. This is a rebranding of our services, so we’ll just be known from our domain name “iMountain”.

6) Major updates to all the EasyApp packages to upgrade to the latest and greatest versions like Joomla 1.5.2, phpBB3, WordPress 2.5, etc.

That’s all for now, please make sure you run your backups just in case. We’ve been testing the installation for a few months now and things look to be running fine.

Enjoy your 4th of July holiday and as always, it’s a pleasure serving you.

iMountain.com

Hosting automation giant SWSoft announced yesterday that it had completed purchase of P-Soft, the makers of H-Sphere hosting panels. You can read the official announcemnet here

Only a few days earlier, SWSoft purchased another leading Control Panel called Ensim Pro Control Panel. You can read the press release for this purchase here.

“H-Sphere is a scalable multiserver web hosting solution. It has many advanced features and a sophisticated billing system to automate and improve your web hosting tasks.

H-Sphere was designed to work on many servers and can be scaled by adding more web, mail, database, and DNS servers without any downtime. It provides a simple, easy-to-use web interface that can be maintained from any computer with internet connection. H-Sphere was written in Java and works with any SQL-compliant database. It runs only industry standard software.”

“Ensim Pro is the industry’s leading single-server hosting automation and control panel solution for hosted Web sites, email, and online applications. It includes comprehensive tools that enable hosting providers to create, control, and deliver a variety of professional-quality hosting plans in minutes.”

Rather than going into what happened and who to blame, we would like to focus on the supportive attitude of our valued clients. We received many emails stating that our clients were not happy with the down-time but were still supportive in our efforts to resolve the issue. We try to maintain a quality hosting environment at all times and we take these outtages personally.

Our network is back again in force and we even managed to expand our network bandwith capacity a bit.

We would like to thank all of our clients for sticking with us through these moments of unhappiness. We feel we have some of the finest hosting clients in the world and the recent support we received from them is proof positive of this!

First off, many will dispute VP Al Gore’s claims but that’s another story for another day. But yes, our core business group is still the same since 1982. The only things that have changed are our location and businesses/industries.

iMountain.com (formerly known as Iron Mountain Hosting) is the brainchild of the founders of Inter Mountain Mortgage. The original Inter Mountain Mortgage offices were located in West Covina, California for a short time. Sorry about the bright spot, this is a picture of a picture in a frame, the picture is too delicate to remove from the frame.

There was only a small staff to start but it quickly grew and we ran out of office space. Besides, everybody wanted an office with a view and there was only 20 feet of window space in this unit.

Since we ran out of space, we decided to move about 10 miles into Pomona, California. We found a great place with high visibility and within a walk of the freeway for easy access. This new building had so many offices with windows, it was easy to move everybody in and still give everybody the window seat they wanted.

Fast forward through the 90s, Inter Mountain grew to a staff of over 200 professionals. Along the way, we picked up Mortgage Banking, Wholesale Funding, Real Estate investing, Real Estate sales and a few guys from the recently closed down IBM Network Operations Center. With these new highly skilled Network engineers, we were able to enter the Data Warehousing industry specifically tailored for Mortgage Banking. Our skills in the Mortgage Industry melded with the technical know how of the IBM guys and our warehousing business grew overnight.

Today’s Inter Mountain and I Mountain bring a business ethic learned through years of doing business in a highly competitive, government regulated industry and our iron clad promise to server our clients well.

We have successefully adjusted and adapted to changing market conditions and have emerged older, a bit wiser and more committed to our clients than ever.

25 years of history, 25 years of growth and diversity. We look forward to another 25 years of excitement!

Yes, we know it sounds strange but we believe in giving our servers some time off now and then. Sure, it affects our customers and takes 30-40 minutes out of their webhosting time. And it sure makes its impossible to get that 100% up-time we’re always trying to achieve.

However, we firmly believe that regular maintenance down-time is essential to keep our servers running at optimum efficiency. These 40 minutes of downtime will result in a few straight months of trouble-free run-time. By taking down all our servers, we get free reign to open them up, have a look inside and make sure everything is working at peak performance. This includes fan-checks, power supply checks and maybe a few good shots of compressed air.

We appreciate your cooperation and patience during our down-time and want to assure you we try our best to keep these down-times to a minimum.

What is a blog? Well you can think of it as an on-line diary covering a range of topics which hopefully will be interesting enough for a visitor to read. Blogs are all the rage these days and there are writers who make a substantial living by blogging as a pro.

We welcome articles written by our users and visitors. If you want to post an article on this forum, just write it up in a text or word document and email it to us. We’ll review the content and if it’s print worthy, we’ll put it up! Don’t worry about grammar and spelling, we’ll edit it for you. Write about anything you wish, just keep it within the realm of news-worthy articles and class.

Enjoy our blog and visit often, we’ll try to post a few articles a week.