Hey all!
E-mail is the main component of my site. Recently, my site has been growing and I have been running into problems with my mail not working.

1) new user registers
2) i create a pop3 account through cpanel with a php cpanel class
3) i have a simple inbox i wrote in php where the user uses to check their messages
4) the more my site grows(900 email accounts w/ 15+ new a day) the more connection errors i get.

Lately, the php connection to my mail server will error and users will not be able to access their inbox. This happens daily and lasts anywhere from a few minutes to the whole day. My host says the only thing they can think of that may be causing it is concurrent connections. They are really no help.

My question is this: What are my options? Can I stay hosting my site with them and host my email somewhere else? How the heck would I transfer all of my e-mails?

I am clueless really and I'm trying to read up more on how exactly email works. Any suggestions/comments are welcome.

Chris

Hi Chris, what control panel are you using right now? If its cPanel you will be able to get a complete tar.gz backup of your site, db's, email, files, etc..

OR you can just get email backed up if you wish, what hosts have you in mind? I presume you'll need 1200+ email accounts? How active is your site? What is your budget?

Thanks and please let us know.

yea, i'm using cpanel.

As far as e-mail accounts goes, I will need unlimited. I'm nearly at 1000 right now and that will go up to at least 1200 within a couple of weeks. My site stays pretty active. E-mail is crucial to the site's content. Without the e-mail functioning, my site loses over half of its appeal. I've already lost too much recurring organic traffic b/c of e-mail errors on the server.

Budget: not so hot. Most of my revenue is put back into advertising right now while I build up a good user-base. I have a pretty cheap reseller plan with my current host. $25/month. Pretty much everything is unlimited with that. A problem I've run into while looking at potential new hosts is e-mail limits. My sit has a lot of connections per hour and sends quite a bit of messages per hour. It seems that most hosts limit your outgoing messages to 400 per hour for spam reasons. I am not at 400/hour yet but will be soon.

Any suggestions?

Well i think you should look into a vps here. If you know how to manage your own vps then you have a lot more possibilities. If not going for a managed vps will have to do, but you really have to watch for good specs.

You just need specify your needs and budget. Only then it'll be easier to advise you something.

Hey Chris,

Its probably best that you do go with a VPS and to setup a unique IP for SMTP.

Because of your budget i don't think we'll be able to provide you anything but you can check the VPS offers or google search some vps providers or checkout some directories. The unlimited email wouldn't be an issue but you'll want to increase your budget, for your sites sake.. You need reliability

www.rapidvps.com has some pretty offers for VPS. Their base package is under 10$ and with a Cpanel license you'll get somewhere near 20$/month.

Yeah, you should be able to get a VPS for ~ $25/month, although I think Ryan's right in that you should really look to spend a little more to ensure reliability.

As an example, our unmanaged VPS:5 is from $12.95/month, but cPanel is quite a memory hungry panel so won't run on it. You'd need to take at least something similar to VPS:10 (from $25.95/month) to cope in terms of resources, then you have cPanel licencing on top ($10/month).

A VPS sounds like a good idea for you, but you need to be really careful - not only in terms of specifications, but also VPS providers can very easily overload their servers making it impossible for you to get good use from your VPS.

Unfortunately there's no way to "know" how many VPS's you'll share a node with, and to be honest any provider who tell you a number is either making it up/lying, or they don't have a clue what they're on about. The number of VPS's is really irrelevant to you, as the underlying hardware specification may support more or less VPS's than another provider, and of course they're not all going to be the same plan (size of VPS) either.

I would suggest that you look around some forums etc. to get a feel for which VPS providers are honest, know what they're on about, and get good feedback - and of course which to avoid.

Buying hosting based on pricing alone is almost always sure to get you into trouble, and VPS's are certainly no exception here.

PS Another factor to complicate things is the range in features etc. of the different virtualisation platforms (Virtuozzo, Xen, VMware etc.) - as with control panels, it depends who you speak to as to which is "best", but it may be worthwhile trying to find out the feature differences so that you know what you're comparing.

wow, thank you all for the replies!

My budget is not set in stone. This e-mail problem is definitely costing me visitors which in turn decreases my revenue. I am willing to pay more than what I am paying now to just host this one site. My current host works fine for the other sites because they are small with virtually no overhead.

Cpanel is not important either. The only reason I would like to have it is because I don't know how to use php to autmatically create e-mail accounts any other way. So, if anyone knows how, going without cpanel will not be an issue.

Managing my own vps might take some getting used to but I doubt it will be much trouble. I would need to do a LAMP installation myslef right? er... AMP, hehe

E-mail:
Many of these plans look nice. None of them mention the number of e-mail boxes allowed; how does this work? How can I be assured I can get unilimited with any plan? Does it all just depend on how much storage space you have? Do I control the mail server and set the max connections, etc?

Storage:
My site files take up virtually no storage space. It is my mysql database that is growing rapidly.

If any of you can offer a decent price for what I need and assure me that I won't have e-mail connection problems like i am now, please contact me at mrtracey[gmail] or just reply. Anymore advice is welcome and appreciated!

Thank you again!!

Hi Chris,

Some or most VPS plans may offer unlimited email accounts, some may limit them, in any event too, some hosts may limit the number of emails sent per hour as well. Be sure that you have asked yoru provider if they are including unlimited email accounts and if they limit the # of messages sent per hour. The user "root" or the admin at the company "should" manage this for you, yet you can as well at your own risk. Our only suitable VPS that would accomodate your situation is $64.95/mo which would include:

WHM/cPanel 11 + Fantastico
Host unlimited domains, sub-domains, add-on domains, etc..
40GB server space
1500GB bandwidth
unlimited mysql
unlimited ftp
unlimited email accounts/pop3/email alliases/email forwarders
Not to mention tons of free scripts to install in a few clicks with Fantastico as well as many other features. Chris if we can still work with you, please do let us know via PM.

Thanks and best of luck!

They cannot limit your number of email accounts because you own the vps, you have root access, is your virtual "dedicated server", you can do everything you want with your assigned disk space and RAM.

Thank you all for your help and replies! I am now in the market for a good vps plan.

Before I make the switch, is there a way I can host my site(www.mydomain.com) with my current host and host my e-mail accounts(email@mydomain.com) somewhere else? Will I be able to create new accounts via some sort of server side script? How does this work and do you htink it would be a good idea?

Also, I started a thread in the PHP forum to see if there may be a suggestion that will help me FIX my problem before I resort to changing hosts. Maybe some of you hosting gurus will have some input on that. It doesn't necessarily have to be a code fix.

You can send emails from anywhere - there's no reason why it has to be using the same server that receives your emails; although you should ensure that the SPF record for your domain (if you have one) is set appropriately for this.

In terms of receiving emails, you can set this to whatever you want (including multiple values) via the MX record for the domain (DNS zone). In this way it's entirely possible to have your website on one server, and your email sent/and or received by another - in fact this is common for many shared hosting environments.

One possibility you could consider along these lines would be to take a small VPS and just set that up as an SMTP server. Then you can use your existing site etc. to connect to that and send out your emails - you can configure the SMTP server as you wish (play with the settings for number of concurrent connections etc.).

The only caution I must mention is that you must ensure that your SMTP server is secure (i.e. not an open spam relay) as any responsible provider will not tolerate that and may suspend your VPS accordingly etc. One way to avoid this issue is to take a managed VPS, but obviously this would be more expensive.

Damien:

Wow, the googling after reading your reply overwhelmed me with information. That is a good thing though. I realized that there is a LOT I need to learn about e-mail before I switch to a vps. I am entertaining the idea of simply putting my mail server on there.
This guide here:
http://rimuhosting.com/support/setti...dmail&t=public

looks helpful with that. Any pointers on setting up a mail server? I have never done that before.