OT: Best Website Hosting?

LanMinds, LMI.net, in Berkeley.

Real people provide real support.

Rackspace.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Thanks, John, I'll give them a look-see. ...Jim Thompson

Thanks, Phil! I ran across a recommendation to them already. ...Jim Thompson

don't use your web host for forwarding then. if you need mail to pass through it run imap or pop3 on it instead - cut out the middle-men.

but if you must pick a supplier that's rabidly anti-spam. perhaps godaddy.

My particular need: I have 100+ E-mail addresses, one for each vendor, bank, contractor, credit cards, etc. Mostly to aid sorting into different folders when received, but also to snag anyone selling my E-mail address to spammers. For retrieval purposes, each of those address is funneled into two addresses at Cox, from whence I download.

Not being very web literate, how would I avoid a "middleman" and accomplish such an arrangement?

I'm open to any suggestions.

I'm considering them. They're local (Scottsdale, AZ), and do indeed have a good reputation. ...Jim Thompson

Just set up a catchall account with your mail provider.

I don't think it's a great idea to run your own email server unless you know a lot about computer security. Mail transfer agents are huge pieces of code, which (statistically) makes them insecure.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Isn't that what I already have at OLM?

...Jim Thompson

I used godaddy for a campaign web site. Price was good, good support and all the tools were there. I will use them again.

They should be able to solve your email issue. You can setup a bunch of different mail accounts or just forward everything like you do now to a couple of addresses. Godaddy can do all that.

Much of the bad press about godaddy has nothing to do with the service. They just dont like Parsons.

I know ;-) ...Jim Thompson

There are technical reasons not to like GoDaddy and to question their competence. We ran into some of them recently.

GoDaddy had decided to move the account to a different server. Normally, that would be transparent to the user with minimal downtime. When the move was completed, all the files beginning with "." were gone and had not been moved. The problem was not the screwup in the script used for the move, but rather that GoDaddy support didn't understand what we were talking about, provided excuses that made little sense, offered no help, and consistently tried to pass responsibility to the customer, even though the move was their idea. In the end, we had to upload replacement dot files. A few months later, we jumped ship to another provider.

Recently, I had to deal with the Heart Bleed SSL security mess. I checked all my customers sites for vulnerability and made sure that their ISP was doing something about fixing it. I eventually got around to checking the web sites run by friends and former customers, when I ran into one that had not been fixed. I contacted the customer, who contacted their web designer, who contacted their hosting company, which was GoDaddy. The problem was that the web designer was reselling hosting and email services on a dedicated server. According to GoDaddy support, the reseller was responsible for security on their dedicated server, and that this was not a GoDaddy problem. GoDaddy didn't even bother to warn their dedicated server and virtual private server customers that there was a problem. That all changed a day or two later, when GoDaddy did supply a warning and instructions on how to fix the Heart Bleed problem. I did not have the displeasure of dealing with GoDaddy support in this exchange, but did receive copies of the email exchange. Mostly excuses and attempts to deflect responsibility, which seemed all too familiar. I recommended my former customer move to another provider, but they're locked in by the web designers package deal.

While it may look like there are a large number of web hosting companies available, most of them are owned by EIG: (including Bluehost). They're all the same operation, differing only in name and offerings. The smaller hosting companies are often virtual operations, reselling dedicated or virtual private server space leased from large cloud providers or server farms. Their ability to deal with upstream problems that are out of their control is very limited. Tech support is usually from LiveChat/LivePerson, which is ok for simple problems, and useless for everything else. Even the billing is outsourced: and who has its own problems:

Drivel: List of know spam operations:

For additional entertainment, it's sometimes interesting to find who is hosting your friends and neighbors web sites:

forward the mail from the 100+ addresses into 2 new addresses on the same server as the 100+. Use IMAP or POP3 to download from the

That is what I do. Many email addresses for different purposes. In fact, when I give out an address on a web site it is usually the form of "url"@arius.com so I know *exactly* who to thank for spam when it arrives. You wouldn't believe who shares your email addresses sometimes, like Xilinx and Altera for example. Not that they are selling it, but they give it out to reps and distis, then it works it's way around the circuit until the junk mail comes from vendors selling grey market parts.

I'm with a small outfit, eboundhosting.com. I do have some issues with them, but mostly on the account I still have running on the Plesk server. Seems Cpanel is their preferred approach, but it is not so straighforward to port over to it, so I have never taken the step to move my own domain over. I have moved all the domains that I host for friends though. They have actually said they will cut off the Plesk server someday, but I've never received a final notice.