I am an end-victim of ILON's (Internet Labs of Nevada, formerly Remarkable Hosting) H-Sphere reseller plans at www.hspherereseller.com.

I signed up with a reseller (who I'm not going to name directly, for they're not responsible for the poor service offered by ILON) in January 2003. Everything was great during the first few months. I've always been a big fan of the H-Sphere control panel, and, coupled with ILON's stability and reliability back then, I had a really nice hosting plan for a low monthly fee (set by the reseller).

A few months ago, however, ILON started having problems. Many. Most of them are outlined below: It all started with an SMTP server outage in June 2003, which caused incoming mail to be severily delayed or even bounced back to senders.
In July, the SMTP server arbitrarily terminated connections with a "-ERR unable to fork" error message.
Later in July, incoming messages were taking over 1 hour to show up in my inbox.
In August and September, they had a couple of severe latency issues involving the server I was hosted on (3-second latency, and not attack-related).
In October, the SMTP server failed to deliver outgoing messages for most of a whole day.
Later in October, I was having a 2-second latency to the server I was hosted on (again, this was not an attack).
In late October, both the POP3 and SMTP daemons were down completely for a few hours.
December was a massive disaster: Dec 8: My server was down due to a "system crash." According to them, "a reboot was required" and I had to wait until "disk checks completed." Downtime: 4 hours. chkdsk doesn't take 4 hours to run.
Dec 11: Another reboot. Oddly enough, chkdsk "only" took 13 minutes to complete this time.
Dec 20: Both the POP3 and SMTP daemons were arbitrarily terminating all incoming connections. Additionally, the MySQL server was down. According to them, they were "required to rebuild the server due to a crash." POP3, SMTP & MySQL downtime: 6 hours.
Dec 22: Apache stopped reacting to requests, and FTP and MySQL went down. Downtime: 4 hours.
Dec 30: The server experienced another "system crash" and required another of those Lengthy Reboots. Downtime: > 1 hour.Finally, today, the MySQL server went down again. Downtime: 8 hours. (all night) Sales are null with no database connectivity.

There were many, many more smaller outages that I failed to keep records of. My reseller behaved professionally throughout all this trouble, always responding promptly and giving me partial credits every month. However, they couldn't do much more than forward ILON's cheesy, obscure justifications to me. Furthermore, no refund can account for the downtime I have had to put up with.

I am truly dissatisfied with ILON. Any hosts offering non-ILON H-Sphere shared hosting are welcome to contact me in private.

Cheers,

Sad to hear things didn't work out. Anyway, I have spent 2 hours just for chkdsk once. Very bad experience :P

Thank you for sharing your experience with us. Hopefully this will warn some people.

I am also sad to hear the bad things which happened. Good luck with finding a good host for the future

Originally posted by UltraUnixNET
Sad to hear things didn't work out. Anyway, I have spent 2 hours just for chkdsk once. Very bad experience :P
Wow, that's a long time. How large was the disk? Did you let it do the surface test? By the way, I actually meant fsck, not chkdsk, but I realized over an hour later and edits are only permitted within 60 minutes of posting.

We have learned that its easier to just take a fresh installed server and recreate the accounts... This usually only takes about 4-6 hours to replicate all the data and permissions on the new server.

Although it looks as if you have been having a lot of problems the last month or so.... hope they/you have better luck in the new year...

I've been notified by my reseller that Remarkable Hosting/ILON will be replacing the hardware on this server over this weekend, due to the obvious problems it's been having during the past few months. It was about time! I'll see how things go and post back here after a while.

Now I just hope they won't keep my site down for a whole day during the upgrade :/

I remember Mathew at Remarkable as a remarkable, helpful and knowledgeable verteran in the industry.

we've been with remarkable/ilon hosting for about 2 years now... on their private server plan... first year the (remarkable)private server backend was ensim... and 2nd year (ilon) we volunteraly switched to virtuozzo (cause ensim, sucked a*s--more than we could put up with--in the private server field)

anyhow...

the virtuozzo account came with Plesk (i forgot which version)...
which we didn't have much use for (only came with demo, 1 user account)... so i stripped the private server of everything related to Plesk...

and loaded up Qmail Toaster (qmailtoaster.com) for handling emails...

and everything else i did (and still do) manually... mostly compiled/update everything from source (rather than having to rely on only rpm's) and maintain apache accounts (and everything else) by hand...

afterall... this was mainly meant to be a practice/learning server...

all in all... i don't think we ever had anything go screwy on us the second year (with the exception of the time when ilon updated their servers a month or so ago: where /etc/init.d/reboot had some setting in it in reference to the old server, which prevented us from SSH'ing in and trying to diagnose the problem on our own.... nevertheless ilon's tech fixed the problem in a few hours time...we never did find out what it was, understandably most techs don't feel like or don't have time going over everything again with their customers)

anyhow...

at first (with Remarkable Hosting and with ensim) we relied on mathew a lot... and he was great, always on top of things, very helpful, friendly, etc...

then the second year (with ilon and virtuosso) to be honest, we really didn't need much of any support... (so i can't really comment on that field)

now...

these past few 3-4 weeks, we did start seeing quite a few dramatic abnormal shifts in performance from good to bad and vice versa...

checking all the logs on our end (private server), everything seemed normal.... so it probably had to do with another site on that server...(that or maybe OS or hardware malfunctions)... cause we were seeing 7 seconds processing time for 1 forum page (Invision Power Board) during off peek hours... which normally takes .0xxx seconds to process...

anyway.... i don't know what's going on with Ilon... if they're heading for the worst or if it's just a 'transitional' phase sort of thing...

but nevertheless, we're planning on moving to a dedicated or co-located server very soon... though i have to note, it's not just due to the poor performance these past weeks, we simply just outgrown the private server and feel like moving onto to the next step...

i don't know about the future of ilon, but i do know mathew's a good guy... :)

Thanks for sharing your experience. It appears that you didn't have as many problems, but that's expectable given that you have control over your own VPS (unlike my reseller, who just has a reseller account).

Anyway, ILON reportedly completed those hardware upgrades on the 23rd. I haven't been aware of any downtime ever since, but I guess time will tell.

right now, during this past hour or 2, one the server that we're on, hosting Private Servers, is REALLY slow in performance (not talking about bandwidth)..... it appears that the server is being overloaded.... i wouldn't be suprised if they're pushing too many private servers on this one server.... (there comes a time when hosts try to make that extra profit, like many hosts end up doing, and sign up more accounts that they can handle)...

oh well...

Have you contacted them to see what they have to say about it?

Remarkable's mail server has been taking hours to deliver outgoing e-mail to external domains during most of this whole week. It's not the first time it happens, and the only thing they do is blame Psoft (authors of H-Sphere) and say they are awaiting their response. What I don't understand is, don't these guys at Remarkable know how to manually configure/fix a mail daemon?

Originally posted by Nicolas
the only thing they do is blame Psoft (authors of H-Sphere) and say they are awaiting their response.
No mud-slinging intended, but blaming pSoft for their mail server acting up, is taking the 'blame it on the developers' tag a little too far.

pSoft actually even released a patch a short time ago that fixes any drop-offs for qMail, you should ask them to install it (does not take long).

Simon

Has anyone had any success getting a hold of ILON hosting? My clients are calling me with complaints and I would at least like to have something to tell them about why they are having problems, and hopefully an ETA. I have called them nonstop and left many messages and nothing. If I hear nothing from them by tomorrow, I am going to start moving all of my clients to a better company. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Burt

Now this is terrible. Yesterday, their mail server started having trouble with incoming mail, which is way more critical than outgoing mail. In the morning, I was receiving e-mail sent to me the night before. Absolutely all e-mail sent to me yesterday I haven't yet received, and I wouldn't be surprised if it has been lost completely. Even worse, I sent a test e-mail to myself from a third-part service and nothing bounced back, meaning their SMTP server just swallowed incoming mail to never deliver it, thereby effectively keeping relay SMTP servers from even attempting to resend mail later. (They think it has been successfully delivered.) I _really_ hope the messages are just stuck there somewhere, because I was to receive important stuff yesterday.

Wow Nicholas, 6 weeks of mail touble can't be good... Might email them and ask if they backup mail,, as I know some don't...

Hi all,
I was actually quite suprised to see this thread and we welcome the feedback. I will be the first to readily admit we have had some major problems lately with our Hsphere Reseller environment. However, whoever said blaming Psoft was absurd obviously hasn't worked with Psoft as indepth as we have. I'm not flaming or "mud slinging" Psoft at all, I just want to pass along to all who come across this thread that Psoft released a bugged Qmail upgrade, which they have acknowledged. We were a key player in troubleshooting this bug and resolving the issue by "un-doing" their patch. They have since released an "updated" version of the Qmail patch, however we are still testing this- so we don't repeat the horror we had the beginning of this month. We have worked long and hard regarding the Hsphere Reseller environment (including replacing entire servers in the cluster) and hope you will notice the increase in performance. I would also like to say that we have tried our best to keep our Hsphere customers up to speed regarding the issues we've been having. We've emailed all customers, posted announcements in our Forum and attached this info to all support requests. Please do keep us informed if you continue to have any issues- just email support.

Just a note about chkdsk.. Linux doesn't run chkdsk.. Linux runs fsck. Fsck on large volumes does take awhile- even hours in some cases. I have a home system running Redhat 9 with a 250GB drive. Unplug the server while the server is doing something and it takes along time to run fsck when booting back up.

Also if you have a VPS plan (Plesk, Ensim, Hsphere, Viva!CP) and you think performance is suffering, please email support and ask to arrange a time to move your VPS to another physical server. Since this requires downtime for the physical data to move from one server to the other, we usually schedule this at night or non-peak hours for your site.

If anyone needs anything, feel free to contact me directly. Thanks for all your support!

Dennis Laube

Hello,

I would like to thank everyone for their comments. The feedback is always welcome. Good or Bad.

After reading the full thread a couple times I have to say that I feel really bad about the problems everyone has had. I do admit we have struggled with the hsphere platform and I see now that we have not done enough.

We have a plan in place and have posted information on our support forums.
http://support.ilonhosting.com/viewtopic.php?t=714

We will continue to make improvements to the system.

If anyone has problems and need to contact us for help the best thing to do is to email support@ilonhosting.com, even if you call please always follow up with an email. All email to support gets logged into our ticket database and creates a record of the issue.

Again. My apologies for any difficulty anyone has had.

Matthew Feinberg
VP Operations
Internet Labs of Nevada, Inc.
http://ilonhosting.com/
http://internetlabs.net/

Nicolas,

Save yourself some time and trouble and give weberz.com a shot, you won't be disappointed. They offer H-Sphere reseller accounts and you can always count on Tracy to help you out if you are having trouble.


Peter

First off, I would like to thank Dennis and Matthew for showing up and posting to this thread.

The problems with the Web service have pretty much been gone since ns2 was (as I've been told by my reseller) physically replaced. What I'm most upset about is mail, having totally lost all mail sent to me on Feb 13. I was to receive important business e-mail that day, which I had to ask the senders I was expecting to write me to resend. Anything else I didn't expect, however, was lost, as the messages did not even bounce back to senders and were just "swallowed" by the SMTP server upon delivery.

I believe the problem was resolved in the evening of that day, and mail (at least incoming, for I have ceased to use Remarkable's SMTP server for outgoing mail due to delays of several hours) appears to have been working properly ever since.

Cheers,

Since there are other email problems again, and I am having a hard time getting through to Internet Labs of Nevada (great phone system, try putting people on the other end), I thought I would try here since I know they monitor this. Mathew, my clients are fuming again. This is it, I am finished with h-sphere and possibly your company. I hear that your virtual servers are more reliable and I am willing to give them a try. I challenge you to take a few moments to call me and get me an account setup so that I can start migrating my fussiest clients over immediatly. I will post constant status to this bulletin with how things go and hopefully you can turn this problem into something better.

Burt Campbell

Yes, indeed. This time, both the SMTP and POP3 daemons kept abruptly terminating connections to them as soon as they were established. This left domains unable to receive incoming mail, and users unable to download any mail already in their mailboxes.

I remember seeing some error message from the POP3 daemon about some shared library that failed to be loaded, but that was the first and the last time I saw that error message. After that, it started dropping connections with no explanation.

While I'm at it, I'd like to mention the numerous times the POP3 daemon has acted up with messages such as "Unable to open that message" and "Unable to unlink all deleted messages" during the past few months. The former means that you have to check your e-mail twice hoping that the doomed messages will not fail to be opened the second time, whereas the latter results in certain messages not being physically deleted from the server, and, consequently, being downloaded multiple times by your e-mail client.

We posted an update regarding Hsphere upgrades:
http://support.ilonhosting.com/viewtopic.php?p=2165

I would like to emphasize the importance of emailing our support@ilonhosting.com when you have trouble. Updates are always posted in our ticket system, on our support BBS http://support.ilonhosting.com/

====
As part of our on going effort to improve our Hspere Reseller system we will be performing updates to the hsphere software over the next several nights. Please expect some downtime to the Hsphere Control Panel server. This will NOT affect the other systems such as mail/web/mysql.

Here is an update of what is going on.

This morning we experienced a software failure on our Hsphere mysql and mail systems. We were able to recover the server and have it back online with an hour.

This afternoon we were working on preparing the hsphere control panel server for updates tonight.

We will be replacing the mail and mysql servers within the next couple weeks. Once this happens the IP address for the mysql server may change. We will notify you at least several days in advance before we make any IP changes.

SQWebMail is currently out of service until we replace/upgrade the mail server. We apologize for the inconvenience. The IMP/Horde interface is available as a substitute.

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we work on improving service.