Professional email services

April 25, 2005 9:20 PM

I'm recommending splitting up our company's webhosting and email services. I'm looking for a group that has a 100% uptime, phone based support - allows us to add/remove emails/mailing lists, and supports webmail.
posted by filmgeek to computers & internet (10 comments total)

100% uptime is a marketing myth

What is your location and budget
posted by ajbattrick at 4:09 AM on April 26, 2005

east coast...looking for hosting for 50-100 email addresses.

Yeah, yeah, I know 100% is a myth.
posted by filmgeek at 4:41 AM on April 26, 2005

Budget is a huge factor here. With 50-100 addresses you might want to consider a dedicated mail server. Otherwise, you will experience random and frequent slowness and connection failures; and that's a lot of people to be getting really annoyed about it.

That being said, there must be hundreds of hosting companies that meet these requirements. I could tell you a couple that I've worked with, but I think that would pretty much just be a random spattering.
posted by frufry at 5:24 AM on April 26, 2005

Web: ASPOne
Email: Mi8

So long as you know 100% is a myth... ;-)

Support is fantastic with both. Don't know if cost fits your budget or not, but I believe they each have several plans to choose from. Mi8 only does email, nothing else.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:31 AM on April 26, 2005

Try Webhostingtalk, a humongous forum about webhosts. Do not expect to get anything else done ever again.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:14 AM on April 26, 2005

Frufry - I do want those smattering few you've used.

I'm looking for some correspondence - some MEFI users who say "Yeah, I've used them, they suck/rule..."

Your 2 cents really counts to me (and anyone else reading).

We're unhappy with our current host. Too slow in any responses. Not enough flexibility.

Why don't we run our own servers? (Believe me, it's occured to me...) Because we have transient IT people, who are already overwhelmed.
posted by filmgeek at 6:32 AM on April 26, 2005

A word about Webhostingtalk: It's a great resource to find out about the companies to avoid, but it may not actually provide you with help on someone you might want to go with.

Simply put, folks with axes to grind generally go there. So if you search on a company and don't find information it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Also - I'll chime in on the 100% myth. 'Tis true that it's all marketing. You can seek out a provider with SLAs, but that's typically going to cost you more than a host without SLAs and even then you're going to experience downtime at some point, it's just a matter of how your provider is able to handle it and recover from it.

Good luck.
posted by FlamingBore at 6:38 AM on April 26, 2005

filmgeek I only mention this because I'm not 100% you've already checked, but would this or this be at all useful in your search?
posted by Ryvar at 6:47 AM on April 26, 2005

Ok, so some hosting companies I've worked with:

Currently our mail is hosted by Hostcentric. It kinda sucks because we're on a shared server and (like other hosting co. I assume) they configure it to just reject requests when the queue gets to large (which can happen a lot). One of our clients has a dedicated server with them (I think about $100/mo.) and it's much better. Over the years their service has been pretty good. I can almost always get someone on the phone and they have the requisite ticket system, etc.

Other stuff we work with is hosted by Interland. They're huge, and have been gobbling up other hosting companies left and right. (Actually they now own Hostcentric). All our stuff with them is on dedicated servers, so I don't know as well how things are on shared environments, but service has generally be decent.

I also have a client hosted by lunarpages. I've really like their control panel interfaces and whatnot, but they seem to have kind of a hands off approach. They want you to send emails if at all possible. I'm sure that's not so much the case if you're paying more, though. Otherwise service has been great. Oh, and they're based in L.A., if that matters at all.

Actually, one of the people who works in my office is on the board (or maybe just a major investor) at Mi8, so I've been indoctrinated to love them. I think they're very good at what they do, however, they've always struck me as designed more for enterprise-level heavy lifting type stuff. Everything is through Exchange and as such it can be a little pricey. If you don't need to extra features that an Exchange server provides, don't spend the extra money.
posted by frufry at 6:59 AM on April 26, 2005

Just a quick comment on my experience with Lunarpages. I agree with frufy that they are pretty hands off. I had sites with them for a couple years, but eventually had to move away when I had some severe downtime that they just couldn't get resolved over the course of several days. Email is too slow when you have customers breathing down your neck and it is very difficult to get anyone on the phone from Lunarpages that can help you.

My new host is moderately better, but not good enough for me to recommend here. So, my apologies for just contributing complaints rather than a recommendation. :-)
posted by rglasmann at 10:06 AM on April 26, 2005