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Origins of IPS offering hosting services

IPS has always considered itself a services company above and beyond a traditional software company. Through the years we have always found ways of providing offerings to our clients from phone and ticket support all the way to our new spam monitoring service and upcoming chat service that extend our software beyond a standalone application.

Soon after IPS was founded we started offering hosting services. We wanted to bring a complete experience to our customers who were interested in both using our software and the advantages of a managed hosting environment that went along with it. The response was immediate and, to this day, IPS hosting provides these great managed hosting approaches to communities.

Over the years IPS grew and we decided it was necessary to stop renting servers from third-party providers. Not only would this reduce our operating costs but, by owning our own hardware, would offer us great flexibility for our service offerings. In 2006 we began leasing space in a quality data center in Reston, VA outside Washington DC and started the process of purchasing, configuring, and installing all the various hardware required. From servers and switches through our core routers and load balancers.

Growth brings us to today

It is now late-2009 and three years after we started, our data center facilities now include:

• Fully redundant, multi-honed 10 Gigabit connections to providers such as Level 3, Global Crossing, Nlayer, Savvis, and Cogent.
• Cisco 6509 core router
• Cisco 3500 distribution switches
• Foundry networks load balancing and failover equipment
• Internal and external network separated for fast backups and restores

In addition to these capabilities, the facility in which we locate our equipment also features everything one would expect from backup power to high security entry requirements.

Here are a few actual pictures of our racks and servers:








(For those of you interested: The RES.S#### means "RESton" - with the servers at our backup facility starting with a different prefix plus - "S" for server (routers, switches, KVMs, etc. marked differently) and the number is the ID of that hardware. For example, if you're hosted on "server40" here at IPS, that's actually RES.S1048.)

Managing our own network connections, network hardware, and server hardware has allowed IPS to provide everything from shared hosting to high-traffic, load balanced solutions. We have experience hosting everything from fun, hobby sites all the way to highly visible communities owned by corporations with tens of thousands of online users. Today we provided managed hosting and services for everyone from national sports teams to world-famous music artists.

In addition to community hosting, operating our own facility allows IPS to offer additional services to enhance our software. Services like our spam monitoring service and upcoming chat service were made possible for free or low-cost to our customers by leveraging the resources available to us in our own facility.

Enhancing our software by using our software

Above all else the most important advantage of our own hosting facility is constant, first-hand knowledge of our software's operations. Because we host our own software on the order of thousands of installations the performance of the software is paramount. Our hosting staff and development staff constantly work together to target areas of the software needing optimization. We do not resort to the simple approach of telling customers to "add more server power" if they are experiencing performance issues as we know, first hand, how much traffic a server should be capable of handling using IPS software and can advise our customers accordingly.

We run our own company forums on a simple VPS setup without any fancy optimizations like Sphinx search, memcache, and other specialized server software. By keeping the setup simple we can emulate what a customer would have on the average hosting provider and learn how to optimize our software in a normal environment. We certainly could implement multi-server clusters for our own company sites but we think it's important to use our software as others do and learn from that experience.



Over the years, our hosting facilities have allowed us to grow our offerings and learn how to create a software platform that can scale with that growth. We will continue to leverage our unique position to develop software and host it all in one, managed environment. Those clients who choose not to host their community with IPS can always be assured that our constant monitoring and learning process will benefit them as well through our continued software updates.

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When you view a member in the ACP you can view all rep they have given and all rep they have received.

Someone should move this to the feedback forum

Everytime IPS upgrades my forum software, I have to re-install every one of these hooks because the hooks aren't being updated with the forum upgrades.

With IPB 3.0.3 Upgrade, IPS Staff identified the following Hooks:

(T30) Bump Up Topics
(DP30) Top Reputation
(T30) Show Reputation in Topic View
(IM) Users Awaiting Validation
(IM) Global Forum Message
(IM) Sliding Quick Login

I just think it's a sorry excuse to say you only support the IPB 3 upgrade errors associated with IPS Created Hooks. The fact is that IPB is supported by third party mods. One would think that this problem would have been dealt with by now. This makes the third time I have had to uninstall these hooks and reinstall them. IPB UPgrades are supposed to be trouble free and work with Skins and Hooks that are already installed.

I hate to say this, as I have enjoyed the forum software, but these excuses are vein and the lack of support in trying to fix this problem has yet to be corrected. You would think that these problems would have been fixed by now.

IPS Staff: I hate to say this but the IPS Upgrades are becoming a real inconvenient Annoyance.

What am I talking about? Everytime there is a service update to IPB (2.0.1, 3.0.2, etc) the upgrade creates havok with the hooks that I have installed. Not only do I have to disable the hooks, but, they have to be un-installed and then re-installed. The upgrades are not anticipating already installed hooks and adjusting for them and it's becoming an annoyance.

Does IPS plan on fixing this problem or is this going to be a regular 'romp and stomp' action with every upgrade/update? For one, I would love to see this corrected.

Ok, so I purchased a license off of ize nearly 2 years ago, and all was well and good, until 2 days ago i try to login to my other account, display name, .Shawn, and find out it wont let me log in, so i try to recover my password, and it tells me there's no account in the system using that email address, so i find this a little fishy, so i contact support, and they tell me that the original owner has control of the account and that there,s no way to prove the account is mine, altho i have renewed it 2 times with my credit card, i gave them that info, gave them my email address that it used to be tied to, and pointed out the face that this guys name is scott i believe and the display name is .Shawn, i find this absolutely absurd that customer service, nor debbie will do anything for me. but really, what would they care, losing one customer wont hurt their pockets any..just my rant on the customer service here.

I am not sure what you expect us to do. By your own statement the account is not in your name it's in the name of the Scott you mentioned. Scott is the client of record. He could certainly login and change that information but that is up to him - we will certainly not go changing client login information just because someone claims to have purchased the license from a third-party site. Can you imagine the chaos that would cause?

alright, ill give up on it, filed a dispute on paypal, hopefully ill get my money back at least the money i paid for the license, just slightly frustrating when something like this happens.

Charles, on 04 September 2009 - 08:17 PM, said:

this is like trying to talk to a friggin wall...