mtroup
Marty
Premium
join:2007-06-28
Hermitage, AR
| How many of you use hosted email services?
Over the past year I have been working to get a solution that is very good at filtering spam and yet at the same time be pretty much maintenance free while still providing the tools needed to offer scalability and redundancy.
I know most people here have the ability to manage and provide their own email services and yet at the same time I see a lot of threads about problems with those servers and needing quick help, etc.
I was talking with a friend and discussing the pros and cons of offering a managed/hosted email solution and the marketability of such a service.
In my opinion it would be nice to have a service that could support many users and I know there are plenty available on the internet but those of you using one, how is the support? I would be afraid of trusting someone with something that is very critical to an outside source without knowing that I'd get real support and not just some automated answering service, online help ticket system, etc.
I'm not trying to do any advertising as this isn't a service I currently offer but am just trying to see what other people in this arena would think about such a service, and what kind of things you would expect from it as well. If I did get positive feedback and interest it might be something that I would really consider doing in the future.
So what do you guys think? I'd like to hear from those already using a hosted service and what you like or dislike about it and also from those who are maintaining servers in house and would like to get away from it, and what it would take to get you to consider swapping to a hosted service. |
|
raytaylor
@net.nz
| I am about to start using an outsourced email service. I thought gmail would be good but then I found the free version is limited to 50 email boxes and the paid version of gmail is quite expensive.
$50 per year, per account
Now I am thinking about using rackspace
»www.rackspace.com/email_hosting/
Has anyone here got any expierence with them? |
|
Killa200
Premium
join:2005-12-02
Spring City, TN
 ·AT&T Southeast
1 edit | reply to mtroup
take it from someone who has been doing hosting services for a while. You want easy as sin email setup anywhere? Set up a linux server and install cpanel / whm. I promise you that is going to take care of not only your email.... but also assist in your name services and web space for customers if you provide it,  Now the system is a pay service... but i think i was seeing licenses for around 40 a month.
Someone probably either has or could be able to integrate whatever billing panel you have as well so it sets up web space and emails as new customers come in. |
|
user4572
Premium
join:2009-05-05
Cleveland, OH
| reply to mtroup
I've been using Allardsoft mail appliance since 05 without any issues.
»www.allardsoft.com/mailserver
I picked up an old server for $50 from govdeals.com, installed it and its been handling all my email since. easy to install, customize,maintain,etc.
My total email solution....$50 server+$49 software=$99 and I haven't looked back.
Since I've purchased it, the price has now gone up to $99 but still a bargin in my book. |
|
Mad Dawg
Mad Dawg
Premium
join:2006-03-19
1 edit | I have a dedicated server with these guys www.lunarpages.com
and also their megamail email service (its just for my clients) so that my client emails are completely separate from my own server
it costs like 2 bucks a month for unlimited accounts
and I cant say enough good about their tech support
»www.lunarpages.com/email-hosting/
--
Best Regards
MD |
|
wvvawireless
join:2005-01-15
Rich Creek, VA
| We use google for a couple domains, it may be different now, but when we setup the domains, we were given as many accounts as needed. I think we have 1000 on one domain, all free.
We also have the majority of our domains on a WHM/Cpanel server. It works great, we do pay a monthly fee for it ($45) on our local server. We use ndchost.com.
My biggest gripe with having your own server is spam issues. We recently outsourced the spam maintenance using ASSP Deluxe. The guy that does that for us is great! Our spam issues are virtually gone now and he's very affordable. |
|
gunther_01
Premium
join:2004-03-29
Saybrook, IL | reply to mtroup
Bluehost.com has worked well for us over the years. |
|
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
 ·Comcast
·Qwest.net
 ·magicjack.com
 ·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| reply to mtroup
GMail has a "partner edition" that you can co-brand as an ISP. WildBlue, TOAST.net, CavTel and others use it. I believe the system costs very little per user per month, even on the higher service tier. I'd check that out.
Also, if you wanted to roll your own solution, CPanel/WHM is a decent way to do it. Though personally if you're going to rent a server, get it form a big outfit like SoftLayer and bundle CPanel in...it'll cost you $25/month instead of $40. SL actually has virtualized servers for $100 per month these days, and they should be more than capable of doing e-mail etc. |
|
dr mongolia
join:2008-07-03
United State
·Cox HSI
| reply to mtroup
Figured I'd add that I can also vouch for SoftLayer. They are truly a quality company, and I have never had problems with downtime or service. This is straight off of a SL server:
vmserver:~# uptime
13:41:07 up 310 days, 18:25, 1 user, load average: 0.16, 0.14, 0.10
vmserver:~# |
|
prairiesky
join:2008-12-08
Springstein, MB | reply to mtroup
we're using ispconfig. It's open source which is nice. It's supposed to have some filtering for spam, but i've never seen it work |
|
gunther_01
Premium
join:2004-03-29
Saybrook, IL
| reply to iansltx
said by iansltx  :GMail has a "partner edition" that you can co-brand as an ISP. WildBlue, TOAST.net, CavTel and others use it. I believe the system costs very little per user per month, even on the higher service tier. I'd check that out. Also, if you wanted to roll your own solution, CPanel/WHM is a decent way to do it. Though personally if you're going to rent a server, get it form a big outfit like SoftLayer and bundle CPanel in...it'll cost you $25/month instead of $40. SL actually has virtualized servers for $100 per month these days, and they should be more than capable of doing e-mail etc. I'm not flaming, but why would I want to spend $400+ per year for a server, when I can have it hosted for less then $100 per year with unlimited bandwidth, space, and 2500 email accounts. AND have it taken care of for me on the back end Cpanel included?
Never had any major problems with my hosting company. and after I looked almost a Million domains there.
I kind of have issues with Gmail and their, this is a trial deal, or we may or may not keep this service kind of wordings for their offereings.
I also have a Ispconfig server going for our own hosting services. |
|
screavic
Premium
join:2006-08-11
Paron, AR
·Verizon Wireless B..
·Alltel Axess
| reply to mtroup
I agree with offsite host your own email on your own dedicated, with little playing around you can setup something easy for your workers or software to setup the email accounts.
Hostgator lacks support but they have a basic unmanaged dedicated (Unadvertised and short supply) for $75 / month in TX. It comes with WHMCS and CPanel.
Another dedicated place I have used that was rather inexpensive for what I got was aplus.net but they use Plesk and I just prefer CPanel (My opinion).
If you want awesome performance with support and networking with a good amount of features for the price I would say something like »ace-host.net/dedicatedservers.html my ping has always been the best here even compared to the Houston, TX datacenter (I'm in Arkansas) |
|
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
·Comcast
·Qwest.net
·magicjack.com
·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| reply to gunther_01
Didn't think you were flaming . You just do things differently than I would.
My college is working on moving over to a GMail-based system. hould help our horrible network/system uptime (I don't think we even have three nines...heck, we probably have less than two). The more stuff you move to boxed hosted services, the easier things should be. If they aren't, find a better hosted service.
I personally wouldn't host stuff on BlueHost, DreamHost, 1&1, GoDaddy, etc. but that's just me. Big shared hosts like that one (and LunarPages' shared service) tend to have problems with overloading their servers, having outages, etc. Not good when Joe Six-Pack calls in and says "I haven't had e-mail for SIX DAYS, FIX IT NOW!!!1!" and you can't do anything because the shared server is broken.
Granted, BlueHost seems to be decent about service, though they load servers relatively heavily. I'm just not a huge fan of using shared hosting for anything more than a personal or maybe small business account.
If I rolled my own solution, I'd probably get a VPS and use some high-end OSS mail-server solution with its own frontend. But that's just me. In reality I'd get Google Apps and have done with it. |
|
Killa200
Premium
join:2005-12-02
Spring City, TN
·AT&T Southeast
| that is something i agree with. If i were going to outsource this outside of my office, i would make sure it is at the least on a vps.... and even then i have seen providers overload their vmware / xenos / etc setups with too little physical hardware for the virtual servers on board.
Its all about fine tuning your choosings... just like everything else you run into in your business. Personally I'd do it on a dedicated server outside of the business at a data center.... just for the pure fact that i see a lot of people generally not going through the effort to use and learn outlook. They instead stick with web mail. In this manner they aren't downloading all their messages, so this could actually save your incoming bandwidth by having all the messages delivered locally.
Also if they vacation and check their email, they are using off network bandwidth to do so. |
|
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
·Comcast
·Qwest.net
·magicjack.com
·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| As an added bonus, pulling down mail and pushing attachments to the server doesn't use bandwidth these days in places like SoftLayer and SingleHop. So if people use webmail they actually tends to be nearly symmetric bandwidth-wise. Not that 2TB of bandwidth wouldn't be enough for an e-mail server anyway. |
|
viperm
Carpe Diem
Premium
join:2002-07-09
Winchester, CA
| reply to mtroup
Let me start by saying that you will NEVER get rid of all ssurgemailpam. We use a combination of Baracuda spam filter with Surgmail and we see very little spam. Occasionally we get a few thru but its MUCH more managable now with this combination then ever before.
»www.suregmail.com this pricing is per server we purchased a dual licnese and have two servers backing each other up which works awesome!
SurgeMail Prices
Users SurgeMail + Avast anti-virus SurgeMail + Avast
with Mirror license SurgeMail SurgeMail
with Mirror license
Cluster $3500 $3500 $1800 $1800
Unlimited $1817 $2725 $870 $1305
100,000 $1617 $2425 $770 $1155
10,000 $1417 $2125 $670 $1005
1000 $1017 $1525 $570 $855
100 $817 $1225 $470 $705
10 $322 $483 $175 $262
5 Home * $87 $130 $Free $Free
Licensing was pretty fair and migration from linux or any other mail service was a breeze.
Now this will not stop all the idot customers from signing up for stuff online and giving out thier E_mail. I see several accounts who Opt in and dont know it and next thing you know Bang inboxx is full of crap. We just take a sample of the spam put it in the surgemail learn screen and bang no more spam from that type of spammer.
SPam is a never ending battle no mater who hosts it. I still get spam thru even on our G-mail hosted accounts so nothing is free from spam no matter which way you look at it.
YMMV
--
ComTrain Certified Tower Climber. American Tower Certified approved contractor. Wireless consultants. |
|
maxit
join:2009-02-22
Fort St James, BC
| reply to prairiesky
Look into the 'perfect' setups for postfix/amavis/clamav/spamassassin & deny spam before server setups.
Tweak the quotas & attachment size and I added an option to send mail marked ***SPAM directly to /dev/null
Worked perfectly for us for the last 5 years, but there is still a little spam that weasels thru. |
|
mtroup
Marty
Premium
join:2007-06-28
Hermitage, AR
| said by maxit :Look into the 'perfect' setups for postfix/amavis/clamav/spamassassin & deny spam before server setups. Tweak the quotas & attachment size and I added an option to send mail marked ***SPAM directly to /dev/null Worked perfectly for us for the last 5 years, but there is still a little spam that weasels thru. This is the type of setup I am running. As you say, some spam gets thru but I am only seeing on average 2-3 per month, which in my opinion is more than acceptable.
The reason I have started thinking about this is because I see how well the setup works and I have setup redundancy across two networks as well. I am moving to a fiber feed (from a single T1 currently) and the redundant server is already on fiber, so I feel pretty safe about the uptime I could guarantee someone on this service.
I understand it would be hard to compete with the big players but it seems like it's something I could offer to other smaller WISPs or businesses that are sick of dealing with their own servers as well as clients I already do business with.
Definitely some good feedback here for everyone on this topic, it's always nice to see what ways you can make life easier in this business. |
|
dusty1300
join:2007-02-20
Mason City, IA
| reply to mtroup
I have used outsourced email for about 10 years now. First with CriticalPath with Postini added for spam, and then about 5 years ago or so, we moved all our accounts (about 3000 of them to Godaddy). We are setup as a reseller there so we sell the accounts to ourselves for a discount. It costs us about $ 75 per year per 2 gb. We dish out accounts of about 5mb per customer so that is about 400 customers. If a customer needs more, then we sell them or give them some more space. This includes virus protection and spam control.
The administration page for this many accounts is a little awkward, but it works. We have had pretty good luck with support on these. Nothings perfect all the time, but it has been pretty good. They also have a very good web mail product as well as POP mail.
Tom |
|
lutful
Premium
join:2005-06-16
Ottawa, ON
| reply to mtroup
said by mtroup :those who are maintaining servers in house and would like to get away from it, and what it would take to get you to consider swapping to a hosted service. For very reasonable fee, Yahoo/Google hosted email service provides a familiar GUI and decent spam control. IMHO quite sufficient for small to medium WISPs with a few hundred customers.
Back in the old days, I used to recommend the all-in-one Corel Linux (which became Rebel Computer, then OEone and finally Axentra) server appliances to small WISPs. The features were excellent (including per user portals and wikis) and performance on commodity hardware were OK too ... but changing ownership made them difficult to upgrade. Our office Axentra appliance was decommissioned in late 2005. |
|
