I recently have been tasked with maintaining our website (newbie alert!).

We are interested in creating a newsletter for our customers. A consultant friend of mine said that the easiest way to deal with this is to use a mailing list server. Our current host (http://www.hostirian.com) wants to charge $5 per 100 names per month (whether we send anything out or not) for this service. This seems a little extreme when compared to other hosts that I have researched. So, I am interested in switching hosts. Our current host uses a Win 2000 OS. Can I easily switch to a host that uses Unix, et al?

Is a mailing list server, in fact, the easiest way to handle a newsletter? I have seen a few standalone programs that deal with mailing lists, but they have been Unix-based. Are these programs something that would be hosted at our hosts site or here using our companies internal servers?

Any help or direction would be appreciated.

Thanks,

John Breeden

The basic rule is that Windows hosts always pay high licensing fees if they operate legal servers.

However unix hosts usually install open source free systems, so their costs are much lower, and their service for a similar price is usually better.

I'd consider going with a unix host like freebsd or linux.

Since youre a "newbie", I'll mention this to you, because it took one of my firiends ages to figure this out cause he was used to Windows...

Unlike Windows, capitalization afftects a file's name. Example, The files foo.bar & Foo.bar are considered 2 different files.