Hi.

I've spent hours searching this forum; my head hurts and i need sleep, lol. If I've missed something, someone tell me, please.

This has been posted here because it's relevant to me as i search for a reseller account and the (eventual) question is about reseller providers. If Mods want to move it, go ahead. :)

I'm looking at becoming a host for friends only, see how it goes, and launch a company if all goes well. From a quick set of questions to target customers, I note that email seems to be the most critical part of their hosting. My current understanding is that there are a couple of options to increase reliability: MX records to point at different hosts and redundancy clustered servers.

Multiple MX records in my view are a last resort backup; when using a reputable secondary mail service at a remote datacentre they should practically ensure that incoming mail is not lost. Yes they don't usually let the sender know that the mail hasn't reached the recipient, but the "store and forward server" can be configured to autorespond, notifying the sender of delay. There are hundreds of posts on the topic.

Clustering seems to be much less understood by people here asking questions about the subject (obviously, lol). It is my preferred solution, based on what I've read. If one mailserver goes down, clients can still log in and retrieve/send mail, as well as incoming mail still being delivered. As far as I know, it requires some kind of gateway and at least 2 machines, probably located in the same datacentre that optionally share the load, and are both reachable on a single IP so that if one goes down the other is still/becomes available. No DNS propogation delay, but single points of failiure include the gateway and network of the host.

It occurs to me that machine uptime and network uptime (local to a datacentre) are different animals, the latter being more dependant on the datacentre and probably more reliable than the former which is down to a particular host. (corrections?) Therefore clustered machines will probably help a lot with overall uptime since machines are the more likely point of failiure - (clustering) makes a lot of sense.

I'd like a small reseller account with thewebserver on one machine, dns servers on two machines at least, and a clustered mailserver solution. There are added costs with clustering, so that's why I say only mailserver clustering. Conjecture: if a provider has 10 machines with 5000 domains on them, it'd be cheaper to handle all the mail on a further couple of clustered machines than to cluster the whole lot. A good host shouldn't have too much downtime for any server, it's just that mail is (probably) most critical for a lot of users.

So the question is: Are there any hosts that sell reseller accounts with clustered mailservers? This is not a request for hosting, it's a question about the state of the market... can you find clustered mailservers without the whole lot being clustered? If so, is that cheaper? Is any kind of clustering available for a fairly small amount of money (under $30 per month for a small reseller account), or for reseller accounts at a different pricepoint? Have I got my head in the clouds?

Many thanks for insightful comments on the forums as a whole. it's a great resource! If my posts show my inexperience, constructive criticism please!


Olly

so no-one has encountered or offers this at all? I guess I haven't really left much time to answer. I wanted to expand on the question though:


How many people would like to have clustered mailservers available to reseller accounts? Do your customers find mail particularly important ("mission critical")?

Olly

Yes, My biggest customers find that mail is mission critical and web page is secondary. I too am looking for dramatically more reliable mail service.'

My current provider seems to have "oversold" their mail server leading to many reliability problems. They also have been hit with a number of denile of service attacks. So let me share my research and experience. If you can stand it;)

Clustering:
I helped set up one of my customers with live failover for their accounting system. After 2 years and over $45,000 in consulting fees the "experts" and myself had caused more downtime supporting the cluster than they would ever reasonably have experienced with just one machine. There are many failures that clustering won't help with. In my estimate a properly configured and supported cluster will cost about 5 times what the equivalent single machines would. It would not surprise me if no one offered reseller accounts on one.

Backup MX service:
This lets your mail wander off to some other server to get back to your main server some time later. Now that spam is so prevalent, proper configuration of the backup server to reliably forward your mail without letting in more spam is hard. I have lost more mail at backup servers via configuration mistakes than from any of my main servers being down.

Backup DNS:
Most hosting providers put both of their DNS servers right next to each other in the same rack. The thinking goes that if both servers are down then so is the web and mail. Well if you have the mail service elsewhere then that is not true. I am putting all of my customers that need mission critical mail on one of the big DNS hosting companies services.

Secure email:
Of course this is technically impossible, but I want my next mail provider to at least do the obvious stuff. SSL on the web mail and preferably SSL on the POP and SMTP too. I want them to support SMTP Auth on some port other than 25 so that my customers don't have to reconfigure their laptop whenever they leave the office. I want antivirus and spam filtering. With control over the spam filter.

What I am planning to try:
I plan on getting 2 mail services. Service A will have all of the accounts set to forward all mail to Service B while keeping a copy. Service A will discard all mail older than 2 weeks. The MX records will point to A first then to B. The customer will check the account at B. If B goes down they will then go to the web mail account on A. All of their mail for the past 2 weeks will be there. This makes most mail take extra time to get delivered. It doen't help when one of the servers is just slow processing its mail queue. I can pick two unrelated providers so a denile of service attack and net outages would be less likley to affect me. I can think of some problems with this but I am getting desperate.
What do you think?

Hey, thanks for posting your experience.

Yeah, sounds like it'd work to a certain extent, but would probably be more complicated than necessary...

Some mail wouldn't ever get delivered to service A if referenced in an MX record, due to broken mail servers on the net (not yours) even if it has the lowest no. (highest actual priority) so that mail would be inaccessible in case of B failiure. No telling how much there would be. Much less would get there if both hosts are referenced in A records. You are asking clients to reconfigure their clients in case of primary mailserver downtime, and you need control of both mailservers (adding accounts to both, etc to make it work). I think it's not quite right. But then, I'm a newbie.

Check out a post by e12pilot in technical and security...

Incidentally the 'best' form of clustering I have found as regards mail available to resellers is services split to different machines, mail on one dedicated server where it's not directly affected by other services mucking up, most notably an h-sphere cluster.

Hope it helps,
Olly

My current provider runs an hsphere cluster. Anyone offering affordable reseller services almost has to be running some kind of control panel. I like hsphere quite a bit. However it appears that they can only have one mail server for the cluster. So that once they get too many customers for one mail server to handle it all starts going downhill.

I did find a company yesterday that offers exactly what you were looking for. hostmail.com had a cute graphic illustrating a proper cluster. I don't know anything else about them yet. They had a reseller page but no reseller pricing.

The nightmare that happened a few weeks ago at my provider was a DDOS attack so bad that their tier 1 carrier blocked their entire class C IP blocks for about 4 hours while trying to stop it. The attack was directed at one web site of one reseller on one server. Although it was generally agreed that alantic.net should not have done that, I need to look at this new worst-case scenario.

Basically, anyone that is affordable is hosting thousands of sites. The odds of one of them getting attacked is a fairly sure bet. If the attack is big enough the whole provider will go down, clusters and all. The only ones who can stop the attack are the teir 1s And the tech doesn’t seem to be here yet to be quick or selective.

perhaps zoneedit.com would be useful. they have something called "backup mail service".

mm... I had a conversation with a different hsphere host that didn't indicate any such limitation, just that they hadn't implemented a mail cluster. But yes, the worst case is that the entire datacentre goes down and no amount of backups in that place are going to work. solution to that is externally managed geographically diverse DNS with very low ttl (not instantaneous), some way to change DNS records almost immediately, and a fully updated mailhost in a separate datacentre in an entirely different IP space.
Have fun with that one!
Olly.

ps thanks for that info you found too :)

I think I am going to look for a mail host that doesn't offer web. My bet here is that most DDOS attacks are directed at web sites.

What about servers that are having their ISP blocked for SPAM? You wait 24 hours or more, and it's resolved, but if you have clients that are getting their email returned, the damage is done.

I am now seeing this happen more and more, even with respected companies. I am trying to operate a reseller service and when my ISP gets blocked as a spam source by one problem, then it becomes a monumental problem.

The company I am using for my services has nothing but GREAT REVIEWS and positive comments. Indeed, their response time is second to none, barring no one. Yet they are slowly getting more blocks that pop up, are resolved, then pop up again.

I dont know what to do at this stage. Are there any ideas here? I dont want to lose design clients because my hosting is getting their mails returned as spam.

Originally posted by tsystems
My current provider runs an hsphere cluster. Anyone offering affordable reseller services almost has to be running some kind of control panel. I like hsphere quite a bit. However it appears that they can only have one mail server for the cluster. So that once they get too many customers for one mail server to handle it all starts going downhill.
.
H-Sphere can support any number of mailservers, without any issues. It also supports mail-relays (second mailserver working as a backup SMTP mailserver). There are also people who are running H-Sphere with clustered mailservers - several mailservers behind loadbalancer to provide high availability mail service.

greatmail.com



This isn't cheap but starts to address the issue...

" Backup Mail Server allows administrators to create a secondary server that mirrors the setup of their primary server. In the event a company's primary mail server is unreachable, messages are delivered to mailboxes on the secondary server. Backup Mail Server not only prevents incoming messages from being bounced but also allows users to send and receive email while the primary server is unavailable.

In order to achieve e-mail redundancy, an administrator must create multiple mail exchange records for a domain. Mail exchange or "MX" records specify the mail servers that handle a domain's e-mail. Each MX record is assigned a priority with lower numbered records taking higher priority. To enable Backup Mail Server for a domain, an administrator must specify a lower priority MX record that points to the secondary mail server and also establish and maintain secondary mail accounts or a catchall account on the backup server. To complete the redundant setup, administrators should create secondary mail client accounts that connect to the backup server or instruct users to use Greatmail's webmail to access and send messages.

iseletsk - I've been looking for that - hsphere hosting with a mail server cluster. Do you know any examples?

Olly

Greatmail is advertising exactly what I described earlier in this thread. So I know I am not crazy. :clap:

They do not however address any of the drawbacks. Mail will often be delivered to the backup mail server even when the primary is up. So the users mail client must have one inbox for both the backup and main mail account. If they are separate, the user has to look in both for new mail all the time. This varies from mail client to mail client and from POP3 to IMAP on the same client. What would be helpful is if we could build a table of the clients that do and don’t do this.

The other problem is that messages will get delivered to a server that can't be accessed by the client. This could be due to overload of the server, the pop3 daemon crashing, or bad net weather.

I think that taking the extra step of having the secondary forward all mail to the primary would help. I am looking at having Fusemail go get the mail from the secondary. Comments anyone?

tsystems:

did you end up going with any of these solutions ?

mail is definitely mission critical these days, so looking at options myself ...

thanks.

I moved a few clients to Simplicato to check them out. Turns out that their SSL certificates are self-issued. This wouldn't bother me, but the error messages are more than my customers can understand. So I turned off SSL. They have workable pricing for resellers, phone support and otherwise working fine.

I also set up my own domain with the dual mail server option. Worked ok. Had all of the drawbacks I mentioned in my last post. The second mail service I used was DNS made easy. They don't do spam filtering and had low account storage limits.

I plan on trying Fusemail when I get some more time. Their reseller program is called fuse platform. $50 per year then you get discounted rates for your customers. I have to put a sharp pencil to it to make sure it's not going to cause me problems. They do give the additional option of checking the secondary server in the above scenario automatically.

Originally posted by tsystems

I also set up my own domain with the dual mail server option. Worked ok. Had all of the drawbacks I mentioned in my last post. The second mail service I used was DNS made easy. They don't do spam filtering and had low account storage limits.


You must not be referring to the DNS Made Easy backup mail service since that includes 1 GB of email storage.

No, I was talking about their junior mail package.

Greetings Olly:

Originally posted by bagel50
iseletsk - I've been looking for that - hsphere hosting with a mail server cluster. Do you know any examples?

Olly

There are a number of H-Sphere providers and reseller providers who frequent WHT; I'm sure there must be at least one of them that have redudant mail servers.

http://www.psoft.net/resellers.php is a list of ALL resellers; you can try contacting each one to see if they are a fit. I'm sure there are current WHT users who can also provide references for the several H-Sphere providers on H-Sphere.

Thank you.

Thanks for the reply and information dynamicnet. A lot has changed since I asked that question... I was in the enviable position of having contacts that wanted hosting from me, and quickly. I was also having growing problems with my old host for my own websites, so I was kinda pressured into a purchase, and chose what I knew - CPanel hosting with external DNS and backup MX for mail security. The irony is that the original deals that were going to happen didn't... so I have a small amount of hosting that's not full, and I have to actively market now to avoid making losses. Not a bad thing, in the long term, but not ideal for now - market and (hopefully) be forced to expand, or deal with (small) losses. :rolleyes:

I have come across potential clients looking for hosting for audio/video streaming sites, and I cannot do that with my current host. So again I am looking semi-seriously for hosting, with secure mail (server clustering if possible) and that cater for streaming. Hspere would be great to gain experience and offer a choice... if anyone knows more about this, please share :)

Olly

Here is an H-Sphere solution...

ourinternet.us/reseller

MX Mail Rescue: acts as your second priority mail server. If the primary mail server cannot be reached, the mail will be routed to our MX Mail Rescue server and wait in queues. Our MX Mail Rescue server will continually check to see if the primary mail server is back online. Once your primary mail server is detected available, the queued mails will be forwarded to your primary mail server. By default, our MX Mail Rescue server will keep attempting to deliver mail to your primary server for 5 days. Mails queued in our mail server exceeding 5 days will be returned to the sender.
Note: Enabling this for a domain will enable MX Rescue for ALL mail boxes for that domain.

no... not looking for backup mx server, but a proper clustered MTA. Your use of the word "our" makes it sound like self promotion...

Olly

Originally posted by bagel50
no... not looking for backup mx server, but a proper clustered MTA. Your use of the word "our" makes it sound like self promotion...

Olly

Nope, jpresto9 is not the owner just a client trying to help out. OUR is just part of the name of Our Internet, Inc.

Thanks jpresto9 for the post and sorry bagel50 for any confusion.

Have a nce weekend.

Try here for Hsphere hosts also:

http://www.hspheredirectory.com/