Shared-Server Spam Issues / Reliable hosting service

[Songwriters7]

After two years of good service, we're experiencing problems with ipowerweb.com, our current hosting company.

Specifically, our emails are getting bounced as spam, even though we NEVER spam anyone.

ipowerweb tells us our site is hosted along with about 400 others on the same server. So if some jerk on our server sends out spam, we all apparently get put on spam lists.

ipowerweb re-assurs us they'll look into the problem, yet it's been over a week and we still get our emails bounced. (We'd move our hosting but we hate to lose our site stats of the last two years.)

Has anyone else experienced this type of problem? What's the best way to deal with it? Any ideas on how we can get ipowerweb to take this problem more seriously and kick the spammers off their servers?

BTW, a designated hoster is too rich for our budget but we'd be open to a reliable hosting company that limits their shared servers to 25-50 or so. Maybe that way they'd do a better job maintaining them.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Steve
http://www.greatamericansong.com

[ADAM Web Design]

My girlfriend's father underwent the exact same thing with ipowerweb. They accused him of spamming just because his email address was in the from fielf of the spam email, without even bothering to check the host headers.

He's with Web.com and seems to be pretty happy with it. I'm not overly crazy about it, but he loves the control panel and the website builder and stuff like that.

Personally, I host with the good folks over at Sectorlink. I run a dedicated box with them, and have had the server for almost 2 years now. I've been with them in some form or fashion for over 3.5. And considering most hosts aren't even AROUND that long, that in itself is significant.

If you need it, on their shared plans they have a control panel too. I don't know all that much about it, since I never really used it even when I was a shared customer with them; I just used the support ticket system, told them what I wanted, and they set it up within about an hour usually (in one case, it took them exactly 60 seconds to do something for me...I timed it. Dat's like...blazin' fast!)

The only thing that bothers me about Sectorlink is the number of employees there named Jason. But on the other hand, if there are 3 employees named Jason that I know about, at least that means it's not some kid in his parents' basement, so I personally think that's the better problem to have.

I'd say the downtime is amazing, but well...you kinda have to HAVE downtime, and I haven't had any sites or servers (shared or dedicated) go down for me since a month before the 2003 blackout, which they actually were up for because they were smart and had the backup gas generators happening.

Great support, great service, easy to deal with, and any bumps in the road are of the "stuff happens" variety and minimal. That's why I like the guys at Sectorlink.

There's some other stuff you'll want to consider before selecting a hosting package and hosting company, which I'm gonna be a real good guy and list for you below:

1. Bandwidth and storage space. How much bandwidth and storage space does your site use? I think with ipowerweb's control panel, if you click on "Stats", it has two bars that tells you this right off the top. If not, check your AWStats.
2. Email accounts/forwards. How many do you need? (Email accounts store the emails, whereas forwards are like post office forwards and they just go from one address to the other.)
3. Programming languages. Are you using any? (PHP/ASP/Cold Fusion--blech!--/CGI).
4. Databases. Are you using any? (MS-Access/MySQL/MS-SQL/etc.)

In other words, make sure you know as much about your own site as possible so that you can find a host and hosting plan that will meet or exceed your needs.

Hope this helps.

[Corey Bryant]

Talk to them & see if they can implement SPF records. This might help you with the spamming some but I cannot see how any hosting company does not keep an eye on the emails that are being sent out.

Getting blacklisted is a horrible thing & can take weks to fix.

[ADAM Web Design]

Weeks if you're lucky. Months or never normally. It's a bitch.

By the way, long time no see Corey! How ya doin, man?

[feedback]

Definitely when a shared ip is blacklisted then your emails will not be delivered and having a spf record will prevent spammers from abusing your domain, without a spf record hotmail, aol and others will not deliver the email to the inbox but rather the bulk/junk folder.

Before signing up with a host, ask them the ip that your site will be hosted on and then check it at http://www.dnsstuff.com/ under the Spam database lookup and that will avoid that problem.