Hi All,

I have several questions, but first let me start with this.... I have a web site which has gone pretty busy for the past 4 days. The web site is a c2c site where users post their items to sell/buy. I allow my users to post their items for sale and then buyers contact sellers through a form available on each listing. The form basically uses ASPEmail mail component to send mails to sellers. Everything was working fine for the past several months, but like I said in the past few days my traffic has gone crazy. So last night I started to see the following error message when a user tries to contact a seller....

"Error encountered: 450 : Sender address rejected: Exceeded daily mail limit of 500 messages per 24 hour period."

It looks like that my hosting company has some kind of filter because of which my users cannot send more than 500 message in one day. I was just wondering if anyone has encountered this problem? If yes, then how can I get this resolved. Obviously tomorrow morning I will call my hosting company and have them increase this limit or completely remove this limit. Unfortunately, they don't provide any support on Sunday, which is very disappointing.

Anyhow, is there anything I can do to get this issue resolved on my side? This site is hosted on a shared server.

Having said this, now my next question is can someone recommend me a good hosting company that provides windows virtual dedicated server? Lately I have been having several problems with my existing company and now I am thinking that I should move with some other company. I have never set up or ran a dedicated server, so can someone let me know how hard is it to setup and maintain a dedicated server? I just checked with godaddy.com and according to them you have to maintain it on your own. So any help with virtual dedicated server would be greatly appreciated.

By the way, my application is built in ASP (not ASP.Net), for back-end I am using MySQL database and for email I am using ASPEmail client. So I would like to get a company that can provide me windows virtual dedicated hosting, plus MySQL database and also ASPEmail component so my existing functionality could function properly.

Thank for spending the time to read this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Sounds like somebody may be using your contact form to send spam, perhaps this explains the spike in traffic for the last few days.

If you have access to your raw log files, take a look through them to see if there is a pattern in the messages being sent via your form and if it is consistently the same IP accessing your contact form. Your host will be able to help you with determining if your form is being used for spam or not and how to stop it.

Nope, its not spam, my site was featured in one of the magazines, and have over 360 people registered in the past 36 hours. So there is no spam, its just traffic has increased. Now out of 360 nearly half have listed their items to sell, and many people are contacted each other to buy/sell items. The only resolution I believe is to remove that limit, because I am anticipating more traffic in up coming weeks since the site will be featured on the TV also.

Good to hear it's not spam and that it is all valid traffic. You will need to talk to your host about lifting the limit, there isn't anything you can do on your end. They may charge you extra for increasing the limit.