Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : Server Reccomendation for emails

[webhostingtime]

Hi, I am new to all this server stuff and don't have much knowledge about it.
I am about to setup a newsletter system where I wil charge customers for the number of emails they send. I don't know much about server specs.

i am initially looking at 200000 email per week. what kind of specs would you reccomend for this type of stuff taking into acount that I am not willing to overload the server one bit.

Also what do I need to take into account when choosing a server for ths kind of stuff. the main stuff is sending email so I am not sure if i need alot of diskspace but I think bandwidth comes into it but not sure.

I contacted a sales person at resellers panel and asked them as I thought it was possible to host this on a shared server. but they said on the shared servers you are allowed to send 1500 emails per day only.

So they said dediacted is the best. I was wondering whether the optimus server would be good enough for this resellerspanel.com/dedicated_servers/dedicated_servers

Have a few other questions after the above has been answered

1) do I need any special softare to get the server running. Do i have to have cPanel to setup everything.
2) my newsletter system will mainly be a script that you would normally install so its not a problem. But I want to kow about anything else i need to setup.


Any help would be greatly appreciated & any other hosts suggestions are welcome.

Thanks

[Richard]

With 200,000 e-mails per week, you'll need nothing less than a dedicated server due to the amount of disk I/O. I highly doubt any VPS/VDS would suffice in your situation. Control panel software such as cPanel come pre-configured with mail software (SMTP/POP3/IMAP4) however you may be required to tweak certain settings, which may or may not be accessable to you directly from the control panel, to continue the flow of mail.

With such a volume, it's good to have either a managed server or a skilled administrator set everything up for you so your stock cPanel/Plesk/whatever configuration doesn't crash and burn.

I would recommend nothing less than 1.6GHz/512MB if you plan on doing anything else besides shoot e-mail everywhere because most of these super-duper control panels such as cPanel take up a lot of resources in their own right if not toned down to just what you need.

Good luck.

[webhostingtime]

Thank for the response. things are starting to get clearer.

So, does this mean that I will need to configure cPanel (which is what I am most likely to use) to work with this type of system otherwise i will be running into problems. What kind of configurations are these?

I thought i would need some specs like 2ghz+, at least 2gb ram,.
I am not sure about disk space and bandwidth, but do these come into this sort of system.

Finally, anything else I need to consider?

Once again thanks for your responseas it has helped.

[slack]

Email is nasty business anymore. I doubt that you'll find a shared host that will allow you to do this. You might even get into trouble leasing a dedicated unless you're very, very careful to monitor for spam. I hope to heck you're not a spammer cause I'd hate to help you if you were!

Anyhow, it shouldn't take too big a server. 200,000 messages a week is what, like one email every 3 seconds? That's not too bad. Of course they're not all going to go out in a nice uniform fashion, but the nice thing about email is that nobody expects that it's goiig to be sent, received, and read instantly. You have to also account for the overhead of the mailinglist software, and will customers be logging on to this server via the web to configure their lists?

I'm guessing that Richard H's minimum recommendation is fairly accurate. Right now a 2.4Ghz processor is pretty standard on the low end. 512MB will probably get you there, and you can always have the hosting company toss in another 512 later if you need it.

[sailorFred]

It's very difficult to send bulk email now, spam or not.

Basically, you have to expect that the major recipients of mail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc. are going to block your server on principle, and it's up to you to jump through their hoops to get them to receive it. I have a machine that from the very first mail I sent from it, Yahoo blocked it as bulk, even though I was sending 1 message per day to their systems. (my own account)

If you don't know this already, you're going to find it difficult to get customers, since you are naive about the state of meil delivery.

Check YesMail, DigitalImpact, etc. for how their stock is in decline because it's such a hassle to send bulk mail.

Using stock sendmail, exim, postfix, qmail will cause problems because they won't know how to trickle the mail into the very sensitive servers at the big recipients.

Take this as a warning that this is not an easy business to get into.

[webhostingtime]

hmm, I thik it is hard to get started after all.
BTW, definetly not spamming and I was going to come into this after I was sure about the specs as I want to be able to control this. I know this is one of the big issues in such businesses.

I didn't think about that my server could get blocked. I definetly need to know more about this nd any ways around it. Maybe if I can find find something I can do about it I can make this one of the main features.

Thanks for the replies.

[KGIII]

You know who MIGHT be able to help with this? See the folks at the spamcop.net site. They are, some of them, legit email marketers. Email marketing isn't quite dead yet I don't think and some recent options from the folks at AOL show that it's still a viable resource but my guess is you'll want both dedicated and something custom eventually.

KGIII

[sailorFred]

Yes, check out items like this: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...-pe-california

AOL and Yahoo want to charge to receive email. Maybe they see paid mailing companies, and want to cut out the middle man, charging the mail sources directly.

[webhostingtime]

You know who MIGHT be able to help with this? See the folks at the spamcop.net site. They are, some of them, legit email marketers. Email marketing isn't quite dead yet I don't think and some recent options from the folks at AOL show that it's still a viable resource but my guess is you'll want both dedicated and something custom eventually.

Thanks, but I still don't understand how they can help. I've checked their site and theirs nothing about keeping a server from being blacklisted or blocked by email providers.

Yes, check out items like this: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...-pe-california

AOL and Yahoo want to charge to receive email. Maybe they see paid mailing companies, and want to cut out the middle man, charging the mail sources directly.

Thanks. I wouldn't mind paying a one off fee of about $200 or $20/month if it guarantees email is delivered to inbox.

My other concern is, even if am registered to let email through, I cannot guarantee that spam will not be sent as it will not be me who will be sending the email but my customers. Maybe I need to find a way so that customers can't abuse the system.
I think people that need spam will need to send 100,000s of email. Maybe I can prevent them from using my service by offering a maximum of 50,000 email per motnh as the biggest package.

Anyone got any ideas of any other ways I can stop spam being sent from my server
?. ANy Software?

[KGIII]

They, the site, can't likely help. Check in their forums and newsgroups.

KGIII

[sailorFred]

The one thing you can do to keep from spamming is to charge enough that it's not worth it to the spammers. If your services are too cheap, then they will gladly use you, if they think the messages will get through.

Some people on any bulk mailing list will consider anything they get to be spam, so be prepared to receive complaints and deal with being put on black hole lists.