I am thinking of signing up with Interland to host my website. $19.95 a month seems like a good deal. Would appreciate any help as far as Interland's reliability of webservers and mailservers.

thanks in advance

sean

I've used them for the last 2 and a bit years, and haven't had any major problems. There have been horror stories, like any host.

I have had some reliability probs (about 18mths ago), but that was solved by keeping logs of downtime (I can give you a WSH file to do that) for a day and they put me on a new server, no probs since then.

Do a search on them here and you'll find plenty of reasons to go elsewhere, not the least of which Interland is a spam haven.

Duster,

I know you have a personal vendetta against them, but have you ever hosted with them?

I wouldn't host with them for the fact that they purchase network solutions whois database info from netsol to then snail mail useless postcards out to me telling me to host with them.

Hopefully you will do a search in this forum and also do a search at scriptkeeper.com forum. Here is one link with several testimonials from users
http://www.scriptkeeper.com/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000718.html
Good Luck!

I agree with Daniel, I hate the fact they keep sending me junk mail to host with them (thanks networksolutions)

I use to get mail from them. I haven't seen anything in a while.

I don't have a vendetta against Interland. I've just read several recent bad things abbut them. The newsgroup aww has a postiung that mentions a 46+ hour downtime for 1000 sites. Also, their TOS is a sham and a lie. It says they don't tolerate spammers yet they hosted a site for six months that does nothing but spam and sell spamware. Since tehy are blocked by many systemsnfor that reason, I think anyone considering Interland as a host should be aware of their dark side.

Personally, I don't trust liars and hypcrites. Anyone else is free to make up thir own mind about such people and businesses.

So they send people flyers in the post, that doesn't make them a bad host, just shows they are overzealous with their marketing.

Maybe I'm one of the lucky ones....... like I said I haven't had any major (touch wood) problems.

Personally I think 'overzealous' with marketing is an understatement. Quite frankly I think it's darned rude, considering that they repeatedly do it despite requests to stop. The failure of a company to observe Netiquette is not something a customer wouldn't take seriously.

Being overzealous hardly makes you any friends : you're more likely to earn more enemies.

Netiquette in snail mail? I don't think there is such a thing. If a company wants to pay postage for me just to put their mail in the bin, that's their choice. Granted, if they were spamming my email I would have issues with it (as I have to pay to receive it).

What their customers do, and how they react to it, is a different matter. I have no evidence that my emails are blocked by other systems because of one (out of 1000's) customer's action. Duster, can you substantiate that remark?

To be fair to Interland and others, you can't rightfully categorize bulm postal mail as spamming. It is just another gross misuse of the term, just like when single advertisemnts are posted to newsgroups and forums. That's not spamming, folks. It's advertising or plugging.

Spam is not a catchall phrase for anything you don't like, though many peole use it that way. There are other things that are undesirable and unwelcome (*ike advertisments in the wrong place) You don't have to call them "spam to signify that.

There are many anti-spam sites. One that gives a clear definition of spam is Spam Canners at http://members.tripod.com/~SpamCanners/ It even gives the origins of the term (complete with audio clip). Once you understand the origins, you'll understand why many misuses of it are oxymoronic.

As far as justifying my remarks, check Spamhaus and nanae. You'll find remarks by sys admins who block a great many sites, like those listed on Spamhaus. When Harris Interactive brought suits agaiunst MAPS and others (they later dropped the suit), their entire netblock was blocked from many systems. Unlike RBL, they won't be removed. the same thing happened to Yesmail.

Some of these blockages are a bit excessive. Case in point: a few minutes ago, while responding to this, I received an e-mail from someone with comments on the bandwidth page on my site. I responded and just got it returned a couple of minutes ago. My ISP was blocked as know spam source. That ISP is Bell South, one of the 15 or 20 largest ISPs in the country (or world).

---news flash--- I switched to sending out from my server, snet the reply again, and just got it back for the same reason. He must have all of Dialtone's netblco blocked becasue I can assure you no spam has ever been sent from or through my server.

I also got a card in snail mail from them once.
Even though I don't care what I get in my postal box, but I always wondered how it got to me. :)

The SpamHaus (http://www.spamhaus.org) looks quite interesting, however your point about excessive blockages raises a worrying point. Is it within the interest of the Internet community as a whole to block an entire range just to try and stop one person spamming? I think not, otherwise chaos will reign supreme. Look at UUNet on the spamhaus site, they have 23 known spam sites hosted with them. What do you think would happen if their whole IP block was blocked?

I'm all for stopping spam, as I find it a pain in the arse as well. However, is it worth cutting off your nose to spite your face? (not aimed at you Duster, just following up on your point about blocking).

I agree, to a point. That's partly why I gave tghe example of BellSouth being blocked. That's excessive. My primary point was to show that some systems block far beyond what RBL (a very moderate and reasonable system) does. UUNET is too big to netblock. there's a current discussion on nanae about this. Unfortunately, the vice president in charge of abuse doesn't much care to do anything about it. It makes you wonder why he was given the job.

Blocking ISPs like Interland or Media 3 is a different story. The circumstances vary with each one. Part of the principle in blocking is putting pressure on the recalcitrant host, both directly and indirectly (through their customers), to cimply with not only netiquette, but plain decency in respecting others (at least as far as e-mail and spam are concerned).

If customers and potential customers bypass spam havens for those who really will not tolerate it, the hosts will have to change their ways or their customers will find that they are unable to access over 40% of the roads on the information superhighway.

This is truly a case of being either part of the solution or part of the problem. If you do business with spammers or spam havens, you're part of the problem. You enable them to continue. You'll also find yourself cut off a bit. Please don't support spam in any fashion.

I don't think using a supplier is supporting spam, but I guess that depends on your point of view. I use Interland because they offer the service I need, at a price I can afford. If I can find a host that offers SQL Server as part of the same package as web space (i.e. Web Space + SQL Server = 300Mb), at the same price, I would consider them.

Back to earlier, I mentioned a WSH file before, its available @ http://www.inwks.com/download/webcheck.zip. Basically it checks that your server is alive every minute. You can use it to monitor a prospective host as well to check their reliability.

Uh hem. I need to clarify myself here. I meant to point out that a friend of mine (who's based in Chicago) received spam *from them*, not necessarily snail spam. I personally have not received anything, but judging from my friend's reaction let's just say he didn't like it.

P.S. Duster, I do know the difference ;) I just failed to make myself very clear on the topic, that's all.

It is possible to block a large amount of inbound UCE by useing the maps dialup list, it saved our ISP operation as we were seeing between 60K and 100K pieces of inbound spam per day :-( That's 2-4 messages per user per day??? Not sure how or why since we never released any mailing list. Most of it >90% was comeing off of outsourced uu.net dialups.
If anyone is haveing problems dealing with spam I do recomend atleast the dialup list be applied to your server, I can include a sendmail.cf fragment or M4 macro if anyone is interested.
For my personal mailbox I generally use orbs which is way way to mean to enforce enterprise wide but I like it and we have it as an option for our customers.
As to the real paper version of spam recieved via snail mail that doesn't bother me at all. The sender is paying for the postage not the recieveing end paying and there is always a good return address which is non-existant on most bulk spam.

Sam

I wouldn't host with them either. Like Daniel said, those suckers buy the whois from NSI. I keep getting junk email at least once a week, telling me how good they are.
Just thought I'd add my 2 cents