Hi,

Many web hosting provider only provide 1 mail server for each domain hosted on their server. The weakness is when the server goes down, emails will bouncing.

Is there any web hosting provider provide more than 1 mail server for each domain hosted on them? So when the first server (hosting and email server) go down, emails will handled by the second server (backup email server).

Please advice.

Thank you.

I can't guarantee it, (it might be worth asking), but I think HostRocket (http://www.hostrocket.com) are using a server cluster for e-mail. E-mail is not handled by the web servers and as they have tens of servers I assume it's not just one server handling all the mail.

I hope this isn't an advertisement, but we have what we call a failover mail server at a secondary datacenter, with it's own Verio connection. When we do maintenance, all email goes to that server and it's "held" until the primary mail server is back up, then the failover server relays all the mail to the primary mail server.

We simply add an additional MX record to every domain in our system when it's setup.

So no, you can't send and receive mail while the primary mail server is unavailable, but mail doesn't bounce, which sounds like the problem you want to resolve.

Originally Posted by Chad McCan

When we do maintenance, all email goes to that server and it's "held" until the primary mail server is back up, then the failover server relays all the mail to the primary mail server.

Just out of interest, does the same happen if the server goes down for some other reason (like failure of conneciton to the first datacenter etc.) or just when planned maintenance is going on?

Mail will be received on the backup mail server anytime a request is made to the primary mail server that isn't answered. So yes, it receives mail anytime the primary can't.