[SJAAboard] Mail List Problems(long)

[Rob Hawley (SJAA)]

As you have been aware when we moved to BlueHost last summer we got a very
rude surprise with respect to their mail lists rules.  As a spam prevention
and to reduce their server load they only permit 500 messages to be sent per
hour. Announce is large enough so that is a single announcement.

When I contacted them initially I believed that this was a limit on messages
entering the mail list. In any event, they offered an alternative mailer
that solved the problem (or so they claimed).  In the coming months I
learned the former was not true and the latter could not be used without
change.

I have been manually metering announce mail until I had a chance to modify
the email solution they were proposing to meet our needs.  I had no idea how
to solve the problem for chat.

This week the mail lists suffered a meltdown.  There were only 9 messages
total published on chat from July to Feb 1.  All of a sudden I had 5
messages queued for approval on chat plus the normal announce traffic.  Gary
pointed out to me that this was not a workable solution.

I complained to BlueHost about their limit.  Their support representative
towed the party line.  500 message or use an alternative mail package if you
want more(the package I evaluated as not working).

So at Gary's urging I started re-evaluating web hosts again.  None of the
big companies I looked at in the past will meet our needs any better now
than in July.

I did look further and found a small company in Berkley called Tiger
Technologies

http://www.tigertech.net/plans.shtml

Because they are small (and off the radar) I had not looked at them before.
They actually seem a better fit for our needs than BlueHost.  Instead of 500
messages per hour they offer 60,000 messages per month (roughly 100 announce
and 600 board posts per month).  Instead of being a hard limit we could
spend more and raise these limits.

They have been in business since 2000.  Their customer support answered two
inquiries within minutes. You can review their BBB record here
http://goldengate.bbb.org/WWWRoot/Report.aspx?site=99&bbb=1116&firm=33287

They offer direct SSH access which will benefit Paul.  I learned to live
without it.

They will support the CGI scripts needed to run CalStar.

In addition, Gary they offer a canned web form based alternative to mailto:
ready to be installed.

The only downside is that our storage is reduced from 1,500 GB to 5 GB.  We
currently use .5 G and that is after I added about 10% of that number for my
presentations. They offer less bandwidth but still 100 times more than we
are currently using (Again if we needed higher numbers we could buy more).

Tiger is roughly the same price as BlueHost.  BlueHost said they would
refund the unused portion of our prepayment.

While switching would be momentarily disruptive, in the end Tiger appears to
match our needs better.  I plan to keep my own site on BlueHost.

We will vote on this during the board meeting a week from Saturday.


Rob Hawley 


Craig if this post is butchered you can read the post from the website.