First Rant. Why?
Here’s my first rant.
When you call Technical Support, and are told something along the lines of:
“We are currently performing Emergency Security Updates on our mail servers. This is preventing all of our customers from connecting to Check their email. We can not provide you with an Estimated Time of Resolution for this matter. Again, this is affecting every single customer that we have. There is no way to make Your account a higher priority than any other account. This is a Company-wide issue, and is as high a priority as it can be.”
What does that tell you? Does it sound like the company is aware of the issue, and has probably been asked the question a time or two already? Does this sound like something that whining about how your business ‘relies on email’ or that email issues cost your business ‘thousands of dollars per hour (per minute, whatever)’, will make things go faster?
Here’s a clue. Check your Hosting Provider’s SLA (Service Level Agreement). If email is listed at all, it will be listed to indemnify the Hosting Provider of any responsibility occurring because of an email delay, or failure of email delivery.
As for Email Delays. Check into the routing that takes place, and all of the steps involved in getting an email from point A to point B.
As for email delivery. Again, check into the routing that takes place. additionally, check into spam-filtering applications (spamassassin) and services (postini or MXLogic).
As for losing ‘Thousands of dollars per hour’ or ‘Relying on email’, you may want to take this bonus clue:
Is your business worth the ‘savings’ of the Shared Webhosting Environment(SWE / SWH)? Is the ‘savings’ of spending $6.00 to $50 per month for hosting in a Shared Hosting Environment (think Public Transportation) worth the loss of ‘Thousands of Dollars per hour’?
Or is spending more for the reliability worth the extra costs in savings from ‘lost revenue’?
Most Virtual Private Hosting environments (names vary, Virtual Private Server, Virtual Dedicated Server, etc) start around the $50-$80 mark. I’ve used some as cheap as $14.95/mo. You get what you pay for. That low-end option gave me shell access, and some freedoms, but I couldn’t use CPAN, I couldn’t update the version of php or python. it was essentially a SWH account with shell access.
Buyer-beware: some SWH accounts give you shell access or similar options (web-based ‘shell’). Know what you’re paying for. If this all reads as techno-babble, ask someone you trust that understands that odd language. Some of these SWH accounts market themselves as VPS or VDS . . . This is fine. Just know what you’re shelling-out the money for.