Hello,
I am considering hostgator and jaguarpc for reseller hosting. It appears that hostgator is good in all respects except for email spam control. jaguarpc appears to provide better spam control. ANyone input and pros and cons is appreciated.
thanks.

Are you referring to spam control in the sense of spam incoming and being filtered or the server being blacklisted due to outgoing spam?

I am referring to incoming spam. I am looking for hosts that provide good protection against incoming spam (coming to my INBOX).

I am referring to incoming spam. I am looking for hosts that provide good protection against incoming spam (coming to my INBOX).


What control panel do they use? I am not familiar with others, but Cpanel comes with spamassasin which if configured properly will reduce the number of spams considerably.
In that case, I won't think spam protection will not be a big deal.
And I was wondering what are your other requirements.

... Cpanel comes with spamassasin which if configured properly will reduce the number of spams considerably. In that case, I won't think spam protection will not be a big deal. And I was wondering what are your other requirements.

This is the main problem. Almost all hosts think that SpamAssassin can take care of all email spam. But, it is not true. Further, a typical user may not be knowing how to configure SpamAssassin for effective spam control. I have gone through several of resellers like: hostgator, jaguarpc, resellerzoom, and others. Among these, it appears that only jaguarpc takes spam seriously.
Other requirements are usual: cpanel, whm, 50GB approx. BW, 5GB Hard disk, etc. and almost all reseller plans provide these. I am finding it hard to get a reseller that offer solid spam control (in line with, say, pair.com -but they don't offer cpanel reseller) along with other normally offered features.

I had not any experience with Hostgator. But I don't recommend Jaguarpc.

SA is a very good "generic" solution but it's not perfect or right for everyone.

I had not any experience with Hostgator. But I don't recommend Jaguarpc.

Could you please elaborate your experience with Jaguarpc? It would be useful for prospective clients to know which area they are falling short of user expectations, like support, features, or failing to provide what they promised, etc.

I do recommend Jaguarpc as i've had my ups and downs but the reason why is because I feel more special with them :D

Could you please elaborate your experience with Jaguarpc? It would be useful for prospective clients to know which area they are falling short of user expectations, like support, features, or failing to provide what they promised, etc.

I had purchased a reseller hosting from them before. The server specifications was low and the speed was slow and the support was poor. But this is my personal opinion.

dhcart...thanks for your post.
I have been considering hostgator.com based on several feedbacks. However, have second thoughts after reading this post on hostgator forums:
http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=23724&highlight=email+spam
A hostgator customer says:
quote:
After about two years of holding out, i finally forwarded my main email to Google's Gmail service. I hated doing it because I prefer to have more control, but after using it and seeing how good their spam fighting tools are I don't regret it.
/unquote.
It is very difficult to subscribe to hostgator after a review like that by an existing member. Hope that gator team would come forward and relook in to the spam issue.
On the otherhand, Jaguarpc appears to have very good spam fighter in place:
http://www.jaguarpc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17830
I agree that the above shows only one aspect of entire hosting service. But for many, protection against spam is a very important issue.

If you look at hostgator's forum properly, you will notice a lot of resellers are complaining that they can't oversell even a MB of space or bandwidth, although hostgator oversells massively.
So think properly, are you going to provide a not-at-all overselling hosting or a-little overselling in a control manner?

Consider all aspects before choosing, but I will recommend Jaguar . ;)

All hostgator accounts have the power to turn box trapper on. Box trapper sends an email back to whoever emails you and requires them to respond before they are permanently white listed and their email is delivered. This is what I use myself and absolutely love it. I went from getting 100's of spam emails a day to zip without losing any legitimate email as seen with most filtering tools.

Don't both HG and JPC offer money back guarantees? Why not try out one or the other on one of your own domains and see how you like their features, support and spam control? Do you have any domains you can afford to "play" with for a bit to see?

hostgator.com: thanks for your post.
Regarding box trapper, the biggest concern is loosing a potential customer. Many people delete an email as soon as they see a link that says "click here to verify your email id" or something like that. For most people, email is like a telegram, that should ensure proper delivery without being acknowledged at a later point of time. I agree that it requires higher level of skills to adjust/program the filters etc. to remove junk email. Basically, that is where the value addition of a web host comes in to picture.
hostmeister: thanks for your post.
I think trying out with a small website will not produce dependable results. The reason being that the emails would not have been harvested by the spammers, and as is the website doesn't get many spam emails.
Normally, trying out with an established website (with `1000s of uniques per day) will be costly as you loose time and money. Therefore, many potential customers may not want to try if there is any doubt about some aspect of hosting, rather they wait for clarifications.
I feel every host needs to post their spam policy (for both incoming and outgoing), and how they control it (from time to time, rather than just saying "Spam Assassin is available" or "box trapper is available"). Anyway, its my opinion only.

anandsoft I check the junk folder often and I don't believe I've ever seen someone not verify.

One could say the same thing about emails being lost in a spam filter. In the end it all comes down to personal preference, and what works best for what your trying to accomplish.

Of course, it finally comes to personal preferences, and the preferences are diverse. Do you think there is scope for improvement when a customer intends to forward all his/her email to a gmail address because he is not able to cope up with the spam?

Vijay, as far as SpamAssassin is considered it is a wonderful anti spam system if configured properly, and that does not mean each of your client will need to do it himself. I think there are many hosts here who are having good SPAM control using SpamAssassin. Do some search here on WHT, I am sure you will find some one with good reviews on areas of your concern.

Both hosting providers seem to have a good reputation at WHT. However, the only one I have used is HostGator. When I had a reseller account with them I had very few problems. My only major problem was an annoying live chat representative, which Brent says the guy most likely does not work there anymore.

Good luck!

i highly recommend jaguarpc, ive used them in the past and have had 0 problems.

I agree Boxtrapper isnt a suitable system. Spamassassin does a bit, and if your main server is already configured well by the hosts (or you should ask them to optimize their EXIM (or whatever MTA they use). That does cut down spam itself.

iam with jaguarPC for the past 7 months .. they are excellent and everything is pretty with them

for sure go with them (Y)

Vijay, as far as SpamAssassin is considered it is a wonderful anti spam system if configured properly, and that does not mean each of your client will need to do it himself.

I agree with your statement that it's not necessarily the clients responsibility to contain spam, given SpamAssassin. The primary responsibility rests with the hosting provider. For example, if a client spends, say 1 hour per day configuring this spam filters (or whatever), then he/she would be the only one to get benefited. On the other hand, if the web hosting provider takes care of spam by spending the same time every day, several thousand clients will get benefited. Therefore, it is most appropriate for the web hosting provider to take care of spam. I further believe, there will always be a means to achieve this, unless the hosting provider doesn't want to spend any time whatsoever and delegates the entire responsibility to the clients. I think majority of the hosting providers are not doing enough to fight spam.

A clear statement about the methodology employed in spam filtering will be a big plus for any hosting provider.

From what I've seen it appears as though the majority go for HostGator. I don't have any personal experience with them, but I have talked to them about their hosting solutions. They seem to be a good reseller hosting company. I have heard a few negative things about JaguarPC though.

I would say JaguarPC all the way. I have been with jaguarpc now for about 2 Months, and i HAVENT HAD AN OUTAGE YET! Their servers are fast too! Hope this helps

Personally, I would not want my hosting company blocking emails for me. If their rule list is too aggressive it could kill normal emails. Personally I like cPanel for the spam filtering. I can add the common spam subjects and body contents to my filters to eliminate most of my spam. I found spam assassin was blocking some legit emails.

It appears that some members have mistaken spam control as "zero spam". Zero spam is practically not possible, and not even recommended because it is bound to filter some legit emails. Some amount of spam is tolerable. If there is a possibility of loosing legit email, err on the positive side.
To gauge the proportion of spam problem, look at a thread going on at webmasterworld.com (the topic says "Measures to Deal With 60,000 Trash & Spam Emails Per Day" (ww home page discussion, but requires login). What I mean by spam control is to have a significant reduction of spam using effective and measurable spam control mechanisms.

jagpc is pretty good, used them for a couple of my personal sites back in the day :)

It appears that some members have mistaken spam control as "zero spam". Zero spam is practically not possible, and not even recommended because it is bound to filter some legit emails. Some amount of spam is tolerable. If there is a possibility of loosing legit email, err on the positive side.
To gauge the proportion of spam problem, look at a thread going on at webmasterworld.com (the topic says "Measures to Deal With 60,000 Trash & Spam Emails Per Day" (ww home page discussion, but requires login). What I mean by spam control is to have a significant reduction of spam using effective and measurable spam control mechanisms.

None of the sensible host will claim Zero SPAM solution, as that is going to create problems by blocking legitimate mails. But then a good host who cares for his customers will always implement a good Anti SPAM solution, be it SpamAssassin or some other. Apart from that those huge SPAM are also going to cost a host as they will consume disk space, bandwidth etc. Anti SPAM measures also take on server resources but those resources are well spent and count towards positive productivity for both the parties. So if you want a good solution in place you should also be ready to spend some more money as you know a good solution does not come cheap for the host too.

I would STRONGLY recommend that you do not go with Jaguar! Our server has been down for over 30 hours and support is giving us almost no information and very little updates on this. Needless to say, we'll be leaving as soon as this is fixed. On that note, anyone have very positive experiences with other hosts they'd like to recommend?

Sounds like Bozman and I are both on the Demetrius server at Jaguar. I'd agree with him; the downtime we are experiencing for over a day makes me suggest you steer away from Jaguar for reseller hosting. Their technical problems aside, the poor communication from Jaguar to their resellers during this server problem has been an eye-opener for us. :mad: