Comments on: In Other News

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 05:09:50 +0000

Earthlink sees the attempt to reach the dumka.com SMTP server as a relay, and it blocks relays because of earlier spam problems. There are work arounds, but it’s not worth the effort. I’ve talked to their “support” people and decided I wasn’t ready to teach them the basics so they could understand my question.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 04:40:27 +0000

The cost difference is astonishing, except that one pretty much has to be at least somewhat technically adept to host with NFS. For me, there’s no net savings (pun intended, of course), because I decided to spend the difference on a for-real email host. But it’s been worth it many times over in not having to hassle with lost emails… things from clients come through reliably, 24×7. That means a great deal to me.

In my experience, SMTP servers that require authentication will accept mail with just about any From address as long as you login properly; SMTP servers without authentication are a lot pickier about the domains of the From and Reply-To addresses. I can’t say I blame them. My email host has its own SMTP; it’s never failed me no matter which of my email addresses I send from.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:24:43 +0000

I used to spend as much a month as I now spend a year. The entire year cost me $20 for the blog and the regular site.

My brother pays for the dumka.com email server and I think he gets nicked for $5/name/month, it’s through Yahoo and they have garbage spam filters.

FYI, my ISP has a fit if I try to send mail via dumka.com, so anything you receive from me will come from an ISP address, but dumka.com is the best address to send me mail because I will keep it going regardless.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:13:41 +0000

Oh, the site was down for a short period this morning.

And again just a few minutes ago. The morning outage was our host’s problem; the recent one was their upstream provider’s problem. Our host noted that they’re planning on changing upstream services by the end of April… probably good news for us.

My blog and my commercial site, now happily under two separate accounts, are costing an astonishingly low amount, literally pennies a month, and they’re actually more reliable overall than my previous expensive host. I took the two sites’ worth of hosting fees I saved and spent them on an industrial-strength email host, everyone.net (NOT to be confused with recently defunct ev1.net), which has been very nearly faultless for several months now. My total cost for web and email hosting is about the same as it was before, and the service is much, much better.