OT: Current 'best' mailhost please?

[T i m]

Hi all,

Looking for a good / reliable / vfm mail and possibly web / domain host (again / still / long story) and found this site:

And if you look at that first chart it sorta shows a negative trend and following it around from / to the 'Lost to' / 'Gained from' links, many providers seem to show similar trends (downward).

So is this like insurance where many people regularly jump ship or are these stats bogus or contorted in some way (or me just not reading them right)?

So, for example, it suggests 1&1 Gained 100k users from Godaddy but Godaddy are still gaining users (from all the other providers presumably) so that makes Godaddy 'better' than 1&1 for some reason (according to the stats etc)?

Anyway, I think I actually spoke to someone at 1&1 previously and he sounded very much like *just* a salesperson and wanted me to sign up and we could discuss the technical aspect later.

So, small static website, two e-mail domains and 10 email accounts (5G?) across them with whom please? They don't need to be 'The best', just not 'Who sold you that then' ... ;-)

Cheers, T i m

p.s. None of the big ones seem to have very good user rating (well, the ones I have seen so far) and whilst some of the smaller ones have, who knows if they will be there tomorrow? ;-(

[Mike Clarke]

I switched from 1&1 to tsohost.com 18 months ago and have been very happy with their level of support - noticeably much better than 1&1.

Not sure if your 5G refers to traffic or storage. If it's traffic then the "Lite" account at £1.25 per month would probably meet your needs but if it's storage you'd need the "Professional" account at £5 per month.

[The Natural Philosopher]

for £5 a month you can have your own virtual private server and build an email system and web server on it.

[Chris Green]

I've been with them for several years, they are excellent.

[T i m]

Thanks for that Mike, the quality of the support will probably be a key feature of any solution, especially initially.

Sorry, I should have been more specific, it's email storage / mailbox. In fact, I think they might have had 5G before and one user needed an account upgrade to get more (as that was easier (for them) than getting them to prune their emails).

On the subject of mailboxes, as I mentioned they have a couple of domains with related email address with some users using one or the other or both. Some will be specific addresses but lightly used (like 'support@') and others will be used fairly heavily. They would probably also like a 'catchall' address but I'm guessing all this is fairly stock?

The website is really just a holding page so I can't imagine it gains any real traffic.

Ok, and that probably wouldn't be an issue and seems to be fairly typical out there?

I'll check them out, thanks. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

(Just to be sure) This is tsohost you are talking about Chris?

Cheers, T i m

[Chris Green]

Yes, sorry, TsoHost.

[T i m]

No, it looked like it was they who you were supporting but I just wanted to check. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Mike Clarke]

Yes you can have a catchall, each mailbox can have many aliases and you can set up forwarders. One thing they don't have and which I would have liked is the ability to set up set up a forwarder to /dev/null

[T i m]

Ok, thanks.

Bye bye spam. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Tim Streater]

Just filter it into your Spam mailbox.

[T i m]

Noting that they didn't say 7am-12pm 'Monday to Friday', I just gave them a call and spoke to a nice and knowledgeable chap. ;-)

It looks like their 'Ultimate' Cloud hosting package (is that a good thing, cloud hosting?) should do all is required because:

It has 100GB of space, shared by the web site and mailboxes and I know one mailbox was upgraded from the default 5GB to 50GB on their existing provider recently. The web site itself is very small so that leaves most of the 100GB to the mailboxes.

If I get it right they can take over the 3 x domain names (2 x .com and 1 x .co.uk) and they would all be included in the same package price (although the guy mentioned sub domains so I'm not sure I got that right)? e.g. If they wanted 3 different / full domains:

fredblogs-cars.com, fredblogs-boats.com and fredblogs-stuff.co.uk

... would that mean 3 x package? (no real problem if it is).

They can help with the website and domain name hosing migration so that should help but they don't do the emails but I can probably cover that.

Something that came up previously was the idea of email retention but they said they can't do that, nor offer an Office 365 / calendaring support but I think my mate is handling that some other way.

Cheers, T i m

[Mike Clarke]

You can have up to 100 websites (i,e, domains) on the ultimate account so you could have your three domains on a single account.

They don't charge for transferring the registration of your existing domains[1] unless renewal is imminent so you don't pay any registration fees until they're due for renewal. You are however entitled to one free domain name so I imagine you'll only need to pay for the renewals on two of them.

It appears that you can have any number of subdomains for free but that doesn't appear to be of any significance for the way your three sites are named,

[1] I was rather confused when I transferred a domain for free but had to supply credit card details. The system still goes through the process of raising an invoice of £0.00 for the transfer which it promptly marks as paid but the system still goes through the process of asking for details of the payment method.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Absolutely not.

I am agressive with spam. I don't silently accpt it. I reject it as high up the food chain as I can

I keep a register of domains that send it - or purported domains that send it - and reject them all with a blacklist message.

I never throw away spam.

I reject it.

about 200 messages a day currently.

(rhe penaly for having a domain on the internet since before there was an internet in the UK)

[Tim Streater]

And they all rub their hands and say, good show, that e-mail is LIVE.

My email client prevents spam from phoning home, too, so the spammer never hears anything from me.

[T i m]

Excellent thanks.

Ok, that's reasonable etc.

Understood.

Again, makes sense (but only once it has all gone though possibly). ;-)

So, are there any real downsides to all this existing in 'their cloud' or is it typical of what one would get by default these days please?

I know they don't want nor have the means to support their own host machine nor a dedicated one hosted for them, so then it's either a virtual machine (that seem quite space limited, considering mailboxes etc) so the cloud server offering certainly seem to be the best deal on paper. One of the issues for them and hence why they have been looking to move away from their current host for some time is / was reliability, and (mostly) issues with the emails not being accessible.

I understand they back up even their cloud offerings twice a day and so that should protect my mate from any major outage, but I'm guessing they would then lose any emails that existed before the crash and after the restored or would they be re-synced from the (IMAP) client if it had received them?

I think the main goal here is (in descending order) 1) high levels of availability, 2) ticking all the core boxes (domain name registration, web space, mailboxes etc 3) good customer service and lastly, cost.

e.g. I can see tsohost.com are very good VFM but I'm concerned if they are the right fit here (I'm not saying they aren't etc).

Like, with their current provider there are set capacity limits on each (free) mailbox (5G I think) so no one person can hog the storage space. Now that may not be an issue here but it just feels (to me) like that system is more 'managed' (which could also be a bad thing of course).

I'm not sure if this means anything:

Compared with (say)?:

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

I think I get some but I never see it as it's dumped into a Spam box. I have *never* allowed it to open a remote image or clicked 'Unsubscribe'.

Cheers, T i m

[The Natural Philosopher]

They say 'we have been blacklisted'

Because I blacklist them instead of sayinbg 'no recipient' etc.

So he will keep on spamming you.

On the basis that it wasnt rejected, so your email address exists...

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh I have on some.

Bu then I run an operating system that is not that vulnerable to being pwned

[T i m]

As have I, I just don't let it do so automatically.

And I'm still running one that is old (XP) and still hasn't.

Good luck updating your GPS or running iTunes or doing a million other things 'ordinary people' want to do on your 'special' OS. ;-)

Cheers, T i m