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  1. #1

    Excellent Shared host with Mailfoundry? Advice sought

    Hello,

    I am looking for a recommendation for excellent shared or split-shared hosting, ideally with Mailfoundry hardware. I have been poking around the forums for a few weeks already as I know this gets asked all the time, but haven't quite found what I am searching for so here I am.

    I run a boutique web design firm for artists, and generally end up hosting about 4-5 portfolio sites full time and another 3-4 as testing projects that come and go. I don't think I'm interested in being a reseller and doing support, affiliate makes more sense for me, but I don't know much about reseller accounts so I could be wrong on that. Though its mostly wordpress my CPU/memory usage is low with min. traffic, but storage needs higher than average. My wish list is below.

    Since the good question of why I am looking will come up, here is the answer now.
    At 3+ years I am a legacy split-shared client at Crucial Hosting, (before that MediaTemple pre-grid). I found Crucial here when I was looking to upgrade in quality and support, and in general I was happy. I am not here to bash Crucial, but as they have focused on Magneto they have outgrown folks like me and that has become clearer, among other things I recently lost a month of email on my email client (my fault) only to find out there were no backups at all of my account due to being 'legacy'. All said I think they are a good company, they just shifted their focus.

    my needs:
    superior email/chat support - sub 60 min response (don't expect phone in my $ range)
    4-6 gig storage ( artist's like video )
    2-3 gig bandwidth ( artist's don't get a lot of traffic )
    5-10 domains (Hsphere sounds better for multi, but cPanel I know, prefer to avoid 'Addon' domain's if possible )
    real multiple point backups that can be restored, ideally granular, like email ( R1Soft etc)
    5-10 imap email accounts, no bulk mailing

    want:
    mailfoundry or barracuda (pay per email )
    not on an oversold server

    budget:
    $10-15/ month ( per year ok)

    I was really excited about Charkia and was going with them when I realized the storage is VERY low like 500 or 750 meg in my price range. I was surprised by that. Storage is the one thing getting cheaper I thought? I have also looked at United Hosting who has Mailfoundry, but the same low storage levels. I like the way Medialayer looks, lightspeed yea!, but $20 mo only buys me 1 gb of storage (and no mailfoundry). So perhaps I have to give up Mailfoundry and go with someone like SharkSpace or Downtown Host that has a different class of product but still a good rep it seems. If I need 5 GB of storage do I have to go with an overseller in my price range? I was hoping not to.

    Anyone know a host with great support that does Mailfoundry on split or shared accounts and can give me some decent storage?

    if you read till here, you have my thanks!

    best - kurt

    (so long since I posted I needed a new account! but I do read;-)

  2. #2
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Location
    Alabama
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    152
    You should definably check some forums for shared, reseller hosting, You can find the quality host with support your looking for and it does not have to be the big known companies in hosting.with oversold servers.

    Why would you use mailfoundery when you could use roundcube or something?

  3. #3
    thanks, I have actually been reading the forums and doing searches as I know questions like this come up often and WHT is a good place to get advice.

    Mailfoundry is an enterprise appliance/hardware that a host must own, it's very low false positive rates are great. Its way beyond spamassassin. Roundcube, squirlmail, etc are webmail interfaces and something very different. Not everyone has it, and oddly mailfoundry's site does not list clients (suggestion!), hence the search.

    - kurt

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    Hanoi
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    4,309
    Doreo has MF and they seem fit to your needs.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Oct 2007
    Posts
    4,332
    Quote Originally Posted by APS_Design View Post
    If I need 5 GB of storage do I have to go with an overseller in my price range?
    With a budget of $10 to $15 per month, you should not end up with an overseller if you need 5GB of space. That seem to be the ideal space for the price you are willing to pay.
    [ James Lee - Cloud & Web Hosting Specialist 10+ Years WHT Veteran]

    [ Magento Performance Consultation by Magento Master ]

  6. #6
    thanks gate2vn - Doreo is a provider I looked into but I don't know much about them. searching here I actually found the post of when he started the biz in 2001, so at least they are around that long, a good sign. and their ratepoint is ex for what thats worth, I don't know.

    JLHC - I would agree but my first choices like Charkia offer 500 meg @ $10 and 750 @ $15. so not even close, in fact it made me wonder if I was off base. Liquidweb offers 1 GB at $15/mo, also a solid provider but very little space.

    still hoping for a great suggestion!

    - kurt

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Oct 2007
    Posts
    4,332
    Quote Originally Posted by APS_Design View Post
    JLHC - I would agree but my first choices like Charkia offer 500 meg @ $10 and 750 @ $15. so not even close, in fact it made me wonder if I was off base. Liquidweb offers 1 GB at $15/mo, also a solid provider but very little space.
    Well I have not heard of a hosting company with the name "Charkia". Do you mean to say Cartika Hosting? If that is the case their hosting platform is a little different from most hosting provider as they are running Clustered Hosting instead to the common single server setup, which explains the vast price difference.
    [ James Lee - Cloud & Web Hosting Specialist 10+ Years WHT Veteran]

    [ Magento Performance Consultation by Magento Master ]

  8. #8
    JLHC - thanks for the correction! forgive the typo.
    yes I suppose you are right about that. I didn't realize a cluster setup changes the game so much in they typical space/bandwith offerings, so perhaps I am doing a bit of apples and oranges and not realizing it. Not that I think space/bandwidth is the ideal gauge, but it seems to be what we have now.

    I guess it comes down to Mailfoundry not being that widely offered in this type of service.

    btw I checked out your company, certainly seems like a quality offering, its on the list now.

    - kurt

  9. #9
    Actually you have the choice always just do not be lazy and do the search

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    USA
    Posts
    523
    JLHC - thanks for the correction! forgive the typo.
    yes I suppose you are right about that. I didn't realize a cluster setup changes the game so much in they typical space/bandwith offerings, so perhaps I am doing a bit of apples and oranges and not realizing it. Not that I think space/bandwidth is the ideal gauge, but it seems to be what we have now.

    I guess it comes down to Mailfoundry not being that widely offered in this type of service.
    You also have to take the following into account at Cartika.

    They use 300GB SAS drives typically in raid 10 arrays (4-6 drives), combine this with 30 days of restore points and you can see how disk space is more costly than say a company that uses 1TB SATA drives in a non raid or raid 0 or 1 for pennies on the dollar compared to a SAS raid 10 setup, along with keeping one backup etc. Not saying this is the case for the companies you are considering, simply you need to keep this in mind when comparing hosts.

    Also, Mailfoundry at Cartika is actually cheaper than Mailfoundry itself as Cartika charges $1-2 per "domain" that covers all mailboxes, compared with Mailfoundry per "mailbox" charges.

    As far as the cluster setup, this allows them to host each service such as mail, control panel, MySQL, pgSQL, MSSQL, linux, windows, sharepoint, FreeBSD etc on separate specific built servers.

  11. #11
    Hi SiberForum, thanks for your calling me lazy! actually I have searched and its harder to find than you think. Only three hosts on WHT even come up.

    tcstatic - appreciate the lesson and advice re comparing types of storage and cluster. I did notice that Cartika offed the most restore points of any I had considered so far, and I understood it's value, but didn't understand the math of what that would mean until you laid it out.

    the MailFoundry bit is interesting, its a grate value add, I actually contacted MailFoundry thinking they would have on the website a list of clients I could sort, but its evidently never occurred to them!

    thanks again - kurt

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Mar 2005
    Location
    USA
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    523
    tcstatic - appreciate the lesson and advice re comparing types of storage and cluster. I did notice that Cartika offed the most restore points of any I had considered so far, and I understood it's value, but didn't understand the math of what that would mean until you laid it out.
    You're welcome. A lot of people do not consider this when looking for hosting until it's too late. The single drive fails, they ask the host to restore the account from backup and the backup is days, weeks or even a month old. Not that anyone shouldn't keep their own backups (you should). That is why some hosts disk space is cheap, and some "seem" expensive until you start doing the math of disk space costs of SAS/SCSI drives that are much smaller than SATA drives, then raid 10, then multiple backups of this to raided disk arrays, then backups of the raided disk arrays to offsite backup arrays etc.

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