First off, I’ve been an IMH customer for years. Since I first launched back near 2005. I was on their Launch plan for the longest time with no major problems other than a few times my sites got knocked down for something like security scans.
Recently I decided to try out their VPS plan. Which Iis advertised about 10 dollars less per month than it actually is thanks to introductory pricing. Grabbed their 4GB RAM VPS plan and was ready to go. At the time the VPS was managed. At some point this changed during the year.
All goes well for the year until I’m getting close to renewal and one of my services I’m running goes offline. I work to troubleshoot it and see Java won’t start due to memory constraints. What gives? It’s only using 2 gigs of ram out of the 4. I contact support on chat. They’re of no help. I email support and they notify me that it’s 2 gigs of ram with another 2 burst. Okay. Great. Fast forward. Billing is coming up and I don’t feel like paying $530 per year for a VPS I’m not really stressing. So I put in a downgrade request and I get a kickback saying that they cannot proceed due to multiple cpanel accounts. Well that’s awesome. On a previous email they told me they would merge them for me. Many emails and chats later I get told they’ll merge for me. A few days go by and nothing. Forget it. I’ll merge myself. I get it merged and request another downgrade. Fast forward another day or two. We cannot proceed because you don’t have caching. Wtf? My sites aren’t high traffic. I’m running through a cdn. I reply back. Nothing. I call and get told I have to have caching. Okay. Stupid. So I install caching and do a couple updates. Nope. You’re still not up to date. I go through an update everything I can, even those inactive items and themes. Having to disable some that are abandoned from client sites. None of which had known exploits or vulnerabilities according to WPScan. I email again and never hear back again. I call in and they tell me that my emails are getting dropped because I’m responding from a different email. Umm. That’s odd. Great, I can’t chat with the sysadmin team. I’m well enough annoyed at this time, and ask to speak to a manager. He’s of no use. So I have him make a note that everything is satisfied yet again. And I get another message saying that 4 sites aren’t up to date. What? 2 of these sites show no option to update. And upon closer look, their wordpress installer was installing the older version that I didn’t catch. And the other two aren’t even accessible. Being forwarded to another site. Okay, whatever. I offload 2 to Linode and tell them to make the other two inactive. A few days go by, and nothing. Forget it, I’m out. I open up an account with PeoplesHost and begin migrating. So far the support has been amazing. Multitudes better than IMH. Pricing isn’t too bad either!
Bottom line, after 2 weeks of back and forth, many hours of work on my end that wasn’t necessary, and lots of frustration, I can no longer recommend IMH.
As an extra, try out SSDNodes. 4GB RAM, 2CPU VPS for under $160/year! Eat that IMH. $40/month….not even managed.
