E-mail And Bandwidth Questions

[av8ndad]

I am considering making a switch from SBC Web Hosting to Total Choice Hosting. I have a very small site (currently less than 10MB) consisting of general product information. According to the statistics provided to me by SBC's next-to-useless control panel, my maximum montly "transfer" over the last 12 months was 30 (I suppose this is MB, but I can't be sure). I am attaching the detailed usage statistics report to this message.

 

I have not had any trouble with SBC's web hosting services, but I have had lots of problems with their e-mail systems (we currently have 10 POP accounts, but will want to add more if we switch providers). More specifically, SBC changed to all-new servers about 9 months ago. Ever since that time, they have experienced periods of severe latency and/or complete server outages. We have experienced outages of 2-3 days and periods of severe latency (especially on the SMTP side) of 2-3 weeks.

 

As an example, we are now entering our third week of SMTP latency, with sent e-mails taking 3-6 (or more) hours to reach their destinations. When I call SBC tech support, they tell me that they are aware of the problem and that it is due to having "too many customers and not enough servers." They tell me that they are "planning" to add more servers but that they do not know when that will be.

 

So here are my questions:

 

1. Can you provide me with any information and/or assurance that if I switch my domain to Total Choice Hosting that I will not encounter the same kinds of e-mail problems that I have had with SBC Hosting?

 

2. I have sent an e-mail to SBC asking for more detailed information on my monthly bandwidth, but I do not know how much more detailed they will get. Can you tell from the attached file how much bandwidth I should buy from you?

 

3. I noted that you have a server-side spam filter available to your users. My e-mail address alone receives 200-300 spams per day (as reported by my client-side filter). Can I expect this to drop precipitously with your filters in place?

 

Thanks for any and all information you are able to provide. I look forward to receiving your reply.

 

Best regards,

 

David L. Bernstein

Usage.pdf

[TCH-Andy]

Hi David,

 

1. You should not have problems here with emails taking several hours to leave our servers.

 

2. The attached information you provided does not give information on bandwidth. However if this is for a month it seems to suggest that you check you E-mail every 30 seconds, day and night - that seems a little frequent. I would suggest droping it to several minutes. Either that or I've just misread the figures reading it quickly.

 

3. If you set the spam filters up properly, then yes, I would expect a significant drop in spam getting through to you.

 

Andy

[Deverill]

Just as a test, David, I sent e-mail from here to another account I use that is not part of TCH (it's called Runbox and lives in the UK). Here are some entries from the header that came in:

 

From [me]Mon Oct 06 01:55:10 2003

Received: Mon, 06 Oct 2003 01:53:24 +0200

Received: Sun, 05 Oct 2003 18:53:17 -0500

Received: Sun, 5 Oct 2003 18:53:17 -0500 (CDT)

Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2003 18:53:17 -0500 (CDT)

 

You can see that it took a total of almost 2 minutes to go from the US to the UK across a total of 3 email servers. Not too shabby.

 

Hope it helps settle your concerns. I've been here a few months and never seen any email (or any other) delays.

 

Looking forward to you joining the family

Deverill