Mailing list Introduction & Hosting

Mailing list is a collection of email addresses by people and send out bulk emails to all user addresses in the list. The user list can be added manually or via website subscription. Most of the time, mailing list is called "email marketing" by people. A mailing list supported hosting service will provide clients the needed software and list management tools.

Why mailing list?

The purpose of mailing list is for newsletter announcement and business marketing. Mailing list has probably the longest history for online marketing promotion. No matter if we want to send out news update to communities or advertise our latest products to people, mailing list is always most efficient method. An honest and well designed letter will return more than expected.

Best Mailing list Hosting Provider

A mailing list is always composed by thousands of subscribers, once we started the broadcasting, it will cause busy data transition on server & network. Also, if we're trying to send out less quality letters and caused user reporting, the entire server will be blocked by major providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo etc.

Because of this, the mailing list feature is strictly limited by most hosting providers. Normally, we can send about 2000 mails per month via shared hosting service. If we want to send out more, we have to use dedicated mailing list service or setup our own mail server to handle it. A mailing list hosting plan is relatively expensive than regular hosting solutions as it needs to ensure the inbox success. If you're looking for quality mailing list hosting service plan, it's recommended to check out following

Godaddy – Godaddy is leading service provider of web hosting, domain registration and email marketing. If you need quality email hosting plans, godaddy offers economy, deluxe and premium packages for different levels requirements. We're allowed to send additional amount via extra costs. Godaddy mailing list plans come with

• Easy Email Editor
• 20,000+ images to customize campaigns
• Easily add sign-up forms to any website
• Real-time campaign statistics
• Unlimited list segmentation to tailor your offers
• Post campaigns on social networks

Another leading brand for mailing list solution is WebhostingHub. Their iContact list server is fully capable of handling large amount email sending. The iContact established relations with the major ISPs and have been whitelisted with email giants like AOL and Yahoo. Here's more about what's included

• Message scheduling
• Open and click through tracking
• Built in WYSIWYG Editor
• Advanced Analytics
• Bounce-back handling
• Automated Subscription Management
• Sign-Up Form Generator
• List Segmentation
• Multiple Message Autoresponder
• Integrated Surveying

We can also get a dedicated server and install our own email softwares for email marketing purpose. The main problem is about IP whitelist. It's easy to get a server and configure the service but more complex to have it working as expected because of more and more spam control.

How to use mailing list successfully?

How to start successful email marketing? Several tips to follow up

Pay attention to quality
Regardless any good mailing list service, If we just send out useless broadcasting without considering the message quality, even it got to users' inbox, it will be ignored or marked as "SPAM".

Know your audience
It's not suggested to send broadcasting to people that's not in our community unless we're pretty sure they'll be interested.

Give out choice
We should provide an unsubscribe link in the end so in case someone don't like to receive future mails. If we continue to send mails to somebody that not interested with our information, they will blacklist us and report our accounts. In that case we loose a lot!

In a word, mailing list marketing is not just to send out an email to people but to build confidence between audience and ourselves.

Mailing List Hosting FAQs

How can i send out list mail?

With a mailing list hosting service, you always need to send out the mail from management center. If you manage your own mailing list server, you can send the list mail from email account directly.

How many emails Can I send out per list?

The limit can be daily basis or monthly basis, you have to confirm with your service provider.

Is dedicated server better than mailing hosting service?

Depends. A dedicated server will work much better if you're skilled in list server configuration and the related setup. In case you use the list incorrectly, your entire server will be blacklisted. A mailing list service has many restrictions to ensure the server health and much easier to use because everything is pre-configured. Hosting support be able to fix problems at the earliest time.

How do I monitor the mailing lists stats

You can view the list stats from management center where you can see the number of sent mails, subscribers & unsubscribers.

How long will the list server send out my list mail?

Normally, with a mailing list hosting, the list server will pre-check your email contents to determine if your email is legal or if there's any virus etc to ensure the server security. It might take up to 24 hours.

How to identify a good mailing list hosting provider?

A good mailing list hosting must be configured by leading mailing list softwares and powerful server. It must be trusted by major mail providers like gmail, hotmail and yahoo etc.

In case we have a busy traffic website, we have to consider higher hosting solutions like dedicated server or cloud hosting or other service like content delivery network(CDN). Cloud hosting is scalable but expensive service, unless it's a MUST, we always need more affordable service. Today we're going to compare the CDN and dedicated server solutions and find which is actually better.

What's CDN?

CDN is short for Content Delivery Network. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance. CDN networks serve almost all web contents like text, urls, videos etc.

How will CDN help with our website?

With CDN service, there're multiple internet nodes configured to share the web contents so once our website is browsed, it will send out data from the nearest datacenter to users. In this way, CDN reduced the latency or failure that's caused by webserver or network etc. Some CDN networks use P2P technology to cache files on as more devices in order to generate best performance.

CDN vs Dedicated server

Since CDN is already so nice, why should we need dedicated server? What would be the CDN weakness comparing to the traditional dedicated server? Well, let's read below.

Performance
Logically the CDN be able to ensure 100% uptime since it's served by multiple servers/networks, however it's quite possible to get slowness because of network configurations. With dedicated server, performance will rely on server hardware configurations and datacenter network. Because there's dedicated bandwidth allocation, we won't see too much latency.

Reliability
There're many CDN service providers on the market, however their service quality varies a lot. A CDN can be setup via 3 or 30 nodes. A decent service have datacenters on multiple locations on the planet like Microsoft azure, however it's not doable for most CDN providers, they just recent some servers from different DCs and don't have too much access to the network stuff.

A Dedicated server is fully handled by our hands with full access to any side configurations. We have full control over resource allocation as well as security updates/protection. In a word, we just play with our wish from dedicated server, but it requires professional management skills or it's easy to product problems.

Security
This could be the most concern for CDN service. Since it will send our website data on multiple servers/locations, it's hard to get everything protected especially when there's sensitive information on website.

On the other hand, a dedicated server will provide us top level security over any data because everything is stored on a single device. As long as the single server is protected properly, we don't have to worry data leaks.

Support
When problem does occur, the CDN support will have to track every nodes for fixing and the process might take a long time depends the complicacy. A dedicated server is actually supported by our own, as long as the server is up and we have access to it. Means, unless it's a MUST, we don't have to bother our server provider for problem fixing.

When should we choose CDN or dedicated server?

Normally, a decent dedicated server is far more expensive than cdn services especially there're more and more free cdn providers like cloudflare. As above comparison, we should have learnt a dedicated server actually performs better than CDN as it's powered by dedicated resource.

When for CDN? If you have limited budget and website visitor locations vary a lot, we could consider a cdn service. If we have a heavy traffic site with sensitive data such as shopping cart, we should consider dedicated solution or at least a decent VPS server.

Who offers best CDN service? Microsoft Azure is probably the best since they have over 24 global DCs to serve. If we need affordable cdn, the cloudflare might be good to try out and they offer free integration for personal sites. If we need affordable and quality dedicated servers, we highly suggest hostgator, they're powered by leading datacenter provider "Softlayer"

If you want to start web hosting business, reseller hosting would be good to start with. But firstly we need to find  a right service provider from thousands of groups. Today let's check one of the most popular name from the industry – Resellerclub. If you're considering them at the moment, let's dig further to their services.

Resellerclub overview

Resellerclub is an India hosting brand which was setup in 1998 under Directi group(a global internet company with various diversified businesses. It has customers in over 20 countries). ResellerClub offers s a full range of web presence products & services to hosting providers, web developers, IT consultants and domain resellers worldwide.

The resellerclub overall stats

Current Resellers: 100,000+
Domains Served: 5 Million+
Countries Served: 230+

Since the resellerclub is mainly focused on reseller hosting solutions, they offer a bunch of great features to help with your business success including

• cpanel and Plesk for Management
• Reseller Control Panel for Billing & Provisioning
• Robust, Scalable Servers at State-of-the-Art Datacenters
• Redundant Power, HVAC & Fire-Detection Systems
• Complete Sales and Marketing Automation
• Integrated Billing Module for Finance Automation
• 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
• 30-Day Moneyback Guarantee

Resellerclub is also one of the very few windows reseller hosting providers and comes with lots of leading features there. From their own words, resellerclub is planned to be the LARGEST hosting provider and empowers its resellers by seeking to provide the BEST reseller program in the market through a combination of innovative products and fantastic support.

Is resellerclub good?

Regardless how they award themselves, are their clients satisfied with their services? Well, a simple search from google tells us no, because many people have bad experience with resellerclub support. Although their datacenters are located in U.S.A, their support team is mainly Indian based, it's much like the EIG business model where the leading server system is supported by lazy people.

However, regardless how bad they're in people's opinions, they're growing up fast every day! Just from last year, resellerclub moved to a 200,000 squares new DC because the old one outgrowed and can not accept any new client.

How do we think about?

A overview on the hosting market, reseller hosting plans are generally offered as on-demand conditions where shared & VPS are their main business, it's really hard to find some groups who offer reseller hosting service as their main business. However, resellerclub did it! They even setup officies in multiple countries via local languages/payment choice to offer user frinedly support. Whenever you have reseller hosting needs, resellerclub is always there.

As about user complaints on the web, if we read carefully, they're mostly about control panel design and support related, very few about their actual service problems. Since they're serving over multi millions of websites on the planet, it's always quite normal to find such negative comments. I have to mention the EIG group again on this point, they probably eat half of the web hosting market but you really can't find too many good reviews about their service, why? Because they simply serve too many clients. It's pretty fair to any such huge group. If I want to start a reseller hosting some day, I will not be misguided by the negative reviews because I can't find good ones.

Who's top in reseller hosting offer?

Hostgator is by far the largest reseller hosting provider. If you want alternative solution for resellerclub, HG is highly recommended brand. Unlike all other service, HG got very few negative reviews for their reseller service, it's absolutely a surprise for their huge business.

Does godaddy really suck? Or what is actually bad with godaddy services? Whenever somebody request hosting recommendations in web forums or discussion boards, godaddy is always suggested to avoid. Also, whenever there's a service problem posted, people will suggest to move. How and why?

Godaddy Cons from professionals review

Godaddy sucks for what? Here're summaries from professionals in various web forums and blogs

Unstable server
There're many restrictions for godaddy servers and always not working properly with your programs. For example it's hard to configure mail server in asp.net coding and it takes forever to load the application sometimes.

Lack of support
You can't always get in time response after submitting your requests. Godaddy can be contacted only via phone & email support but not everybody like the way offered. Most people would prefer live chat support for instant response on sales and tiny issues.

Unfriendly control panel
Godaddy developed their inhouse control panel software other than industry leading choice such as cpanel and plesk. The bad is not everybody could be familiar with it in short time.

Above points are always mentioned for why to avoid. There are obviously many other stuff being complained for GD services but they're more or less related to the above big topics.

Godaddy Pros

Well, regardless how many people try to avoid the godaddy, we have to accept the trueth they're being the largest and probbly the best domain registrar in the world. Being the industry leading player, godaddy configured top lorch servers and management systems. DNS updates on godaddy end is almost instant while it always takes hours or days from other service providers.

As about their hosting services. I have to say they probably just offered too much via low priced plans. Previously we can get free hosting if we register the domain on their end. It's absolutely a good opportunity for people who just want to practise with hosting and web designs. Via several bucks per year we can test out most features under a regular hosting service. For paid hosting, people might take it as dedicated server for the great amount offers and finally run into problems. It's really not the problem of godaddy.

For now, both windows/linux hosting plans are same priced(for shared and VPS server). No other hosting groups could give out such advantages at the moment.

How do we think about godaddy hosting

Being one of the largest hosting providers in the world, Godaddy serves tons of personal and enterprise websites. To serve the big amount clients, they developed leading management programs to have all services handled properly. From traditional hosting to cloud server, godaddy have everything on hand. It's quite normal to see both negative and positive comments to their service. With our experience, happy customers are always quiet, unhappy clients are more active on the web. Unless it's your real experience, you can't refuse the great offers. Just go ahead and try out yourself since it only costs 2 bucks per month!