great forums guys!

question - I am a weekend warrior when it comes to web design and designed a site for a company that supplies equipment to me (for my full time job). The site turned out great however they rely heavily on email. Every week ou SERVER is getting blacklisted by various ISPs. Im fairly certain there is no spamming by the customer, no mailing lists and no security issues with the site itself.

I have been on 3 different SHARED servers and all seem to have issues both before I get there and after. I assume its a get what you pay for since Im paying less than $10 month and sharing with dozens of sites. Any ideas how to get to a clean server even if it costs me $50-$60 a month? or who I can turn that over to? VPS and Dedicated are ok but I have limited knowledge and time to maintain that side of things

Any advice would be appreciated

Well that wouldn't help as it seems ppl mark your emails as spam, which afterwards is reported and the ip gets blacklisted.
If you have used shared hosting before it means that you don't send massive amounts of emails as there are limitations on most hosts. So the content of the emails is the problem here, so you might want to look into that a bit before you sign up with another host.

I'm certain things will stay as bad or get worse being a shared server. As seen from your budget, i would seriously recommend that you get a VPS plan. With this in mind, you'll have faster connections, better uptime, more resources available and not to mention other various tasks that you can do as root. Alot of hosts as well will allow unlimited email accounts and also NOT limit the amount of mails sent each hour (on VPS). Most providers will provide free support with their plans but be careful because some may charge / hr! In any event, offering free support is crucial i think and you shouldn't have any problems their. You may also want to have a few dedicated IP's just for future use if you encounter anymore issues with blacklisting, but i'd imagine that issue was caused from other shared accounts. Let us know if we can further help or answer any more q's.

best regards!

Yes, you can start a VPS with 20$ only . You can do anything with it and fix your problem easily

Originally Posted by allhandl

VPS and Dedicated are ok but I have limited knowledge and time to maintain that side of things

The answer there is to get a Managed VPS so that you don't have to worry about such things...

Blacklisted IPs are a big problem with Shared Hosting since it relies on your provider to be pro-active about:

• Preventing spam leaving the server (hence not getting blacklisted);
• Identifying the source of spam (e.g. responsible scripts/customers) in order to stop spam emails originating and therefore get removed from blacklists.

You would think that providers would be keen to do both of the above, but unfortunately some don't seem to care!

A VPS would solve this for you since you would send mail from your own dedicated IP address - any blacklisting is therefore obviously as a result of your scripts etc. (assuming that the server is secured from being an open relay!).

For a fully managed VPS you're talking about $22.95+/month.

Did you ask your previous web hosts what are the reasons to get blacklisted? They know this better than anyone. Otherwise i agree you need your onw VPs or even a server. you can get cheap machine for less than $100. It will not be something special but... may be you don;t need a powerful one.

Originally Posted by aeromit

Did you ask your previous web hosts what are the reasons to get blacklisted? They know this better than anyone.

Actually the blacklists are (to a point) the best place to start your search, since the sample email headers as submitted in reports can help identify the source... it's good practice to put a custom header in any of your own scripts sending emails so that you know where to look (to fix the problem) if you get pulled up for spamming etc.

Hosts often don't have too much information about this stuff - usually email logs will indicate whether the email was sent from a specific email account or via a script (the spam emails are almost always sent via a script).

In that case it often requires increased logging and investigative work to figure out the vulnerable script, and not all hosts have the skills and/or inclination to bother with this...

Originally Posted by aeromit

Otherwise i agree you need your onw VPs or even a server. you can get cheap machine for less than $100. It will not be something special but... may be you don;t need a powerful one.

I wouldn't bother with a cheap dedicated server as (in most cases) a VPS from any reasonable VPS provider will be much better (hardware, performance, reliability etc.) than a cheap low-end server.