Charles

This should be fixed in 3.0.5 :)

You can get technical support via tickets in the client area or by posting in the peer-to-peer forums. We don't provide support in the feedback area :)

You can submit a ticket for technical support :)

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.

View full blog entry

You can "unapprove" posts or topics to make them invisible to members. In this case only moderators can see them.

You can also enable the Trash Can feature which will catch deleted topics and posts and move them to the Trash Can. This allows them to be restored or kept as a record.

I am sorry about the delays with your ticket. Your request was moved from our general support areas to the conversions-specific section. The conversions department is more specialized and has fewer staff working in that area. I will see that your ticket is handled as soon as possible.

I think he means: http://community.invisionpower.com/forum/433-ips-company-blog/

Just using the RSS import feature in the AdminCP.

Awe :cry: no one likes my resources area and I made it myself with tables and everything.

Rikki is going to clean it up and make it look good soon :)

They have stuff we don't have and we have stuff they don't have. We're not out to replicate anything. We just listen to client feedback and add/change things with each version.

If you search for something you will notice tabs for other apps (blogs, gallery, etc.) where you can click to get results from those areas too.

Search - we are working on search interface improvements for next version.

Mods area - you should be able to view it even if you're not a customer. Were you having issues?

wysiwyg editor - already exists just enabled it in your settings

Wow... great guide :)

I am happy I was able to help. Apologies for the email issues - it's been an... interesting... week.

Normal stuff like kicking people from room and banning them from joining.

That has been our policy for many years now. When your support, services, and upgrades access expires you lose all access to what we provide. We do not track the version number that was available at the moment your access expired.

Keep in mind we flexible on renewals as well. You can choose to let a license expire and renew it at a later date if you so choose.

I am afraid we have not yet come up with the "don't accidentally close this" feature.

Sorry about that - fixed now.

I originally said the same thing about chat running in new window I must admit :)

I then realized that I could just open a new window myself.

Actually going to be posting an update for CleanCut tomorrow :)

In development department there are 5 full time and a couple of part time people depend on what we're doing.

Do you have a ticket number? There are no sales emails that old in our system so either we didn't get it or you didn't get our reply. We're certainly replying to emails a whole lot faster than 79 hours :)

You can also feel free to PM me.

Yes you basically upload the files and go to /admin/upgrade. (that's the short version)

Upgrade service is included with your license so we can do it for you if you would like as well. That's what Mark was referring to.

As with any business, we have a natural drive to want to increase our customer base. We have an offer you can read about in our announcements forum.

We must also balance that natural drive for more customers with our commitment to our existing customers. They expect constant development and good support which we will continue to provide. In fact, due to the dozens of conversions each day over the past week we are adding two new customer service staff to keep up both with new demand and our existing customer needs. While we are never perfect, no one is, any IPS customer will tell you that we always do our best to serve their needs.

IPS obviously wants to stay ahead of the game and maintain its market advantage in all areas. We cannot under-sell our own products and devalue their quality. Keep in mind we not only offer a product but a large bundle of services around it including private-ticket support, telephone support, our spam monitoring service, and the new live-chat product - all included with the license at no extra cost. It's more than just a simple message board we are selling here :)

The announcements forum is a good read too. Between the blog and announcements that covers most everything.

I'm fairly sure we can assist with the conversion manually if you aren't on 3.8. It would require us to help you out in tickets though.

I know Mark has done it in the past :)