Looking for a safe Host.

AdamZ

AdamZ

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
Feb 24, 2005
Messages
14,866
Location
Montgomery County PA
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Display name:
Adam Zucker
Looking for recommendation for a company to host my website and email. By way of background, My law firm website is hosted by XO Communications which I think is also now called cnhost. I also have my firm's email set up through them which is the attorney's name at our domain (mudrickzucker.com)

For sometime now I've not been able to send a email to ANYONE with a hotmail address as it always bounces. I've had an email or two bounce from a client whose IT people tell him was because my email been identified as a spammer. My partner is getting a large number of his emails bouncing.

The friend who helped us set up our site reviewed the bounce messages and believes its because we are on an open server and spammers live on the XO server with us so essentially we get painted with the same brush as a neighbor on the server.

Anyone have any thoughts on where to get on a server that will be able to prevent spammers from cohabiting with us and prevent this problem. I'll call XO on Monday and see if they have a solution but just in case they don't I'd like to have some options.
 
Yes, I have had that trouble with the cheapo hosting company I am with now. Luckily, it only seemed to affect one bellsouth.net address. I am with Crucial Paradigm and am happy otherwise but I would not rec them for your use.

I was with A Small Orange and they seemed like a very reputable firm based in the US. I would recommend them to you. I left them for price reasons.
 
Make sure your reverse DNS is setup correctly. Many sites will do a reverse DNS lookup and if the IP doesn't match, it will be blocked. It must match your MX record.
 
Adam,

I know everyone loves to hate Microsoft, but my firm (about 12 users) has been very happy with the hosted exchange product on Office365.

Pricing is great and it has been reliable.

Give me a call or pm if you want to discuss.

Ted
 
alfadog said:
Yes, I have had that trouble with the cheapo hosting company I am with now. Luckily, it only seemed to affect one bellsouth.net address. I am with Crucial Paradigm and am happy otherwise but I would not rec them for your use.

I was with A Small Orange and they seemed like a very reputable firm based in the US. I would recommend them to you. I left them for price reasons.
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Thanks for the recommendations. Curious as to why you say Crucial Paradigm? No experience with them just curious. Also if it matters we are a small 2-3 person law firm so were not like a huge e-commerce site.
 
AdamZ said:
Thanks for the recommendations. Curious as to why you say Crucial Paradigm? No experience with them just curious. Also if it matters we are a small 2-3 person law firm so were not like a huge e-commerce site.
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Just to be clear, I said steer clear of Crucial if you are worried about blacklists. I just think that the cheapo off-shore hosting firms will attract spammers and Crucial has already demonstrated to me that they get themselves on spammer blacklist(s). I have been happy with Crucial except that I cannot email one person and have to go to the trouble of using my Gmail account to respond to emails from them. Crucial is cheap enough to give them a try if you care to.
 
If you have a stable internet connection and static IPs you could also set up your own linux box to do the same.

I have run into the same spammer cohabitation problem with the hosting company I am using. When it occurs, I contact their support, they move me to a new server and get rid of the spammer. The blacklists re-set every X hours, so once the host eliminates the problem customer, the block times out pretty quickly.

I had one problem with one of the cheap hosting re-sellers and that was the owner fleeing back to Russia with all the contents of the servers. Just be aware that every email you store on a hosyed system is exposed to malfeasance at the hosts company. For a lawfirm, that may be a consideration and maybe a good idea to go with a provider that is able to provide you with a more secured system.
 
My wife has a company that has about 30 people. I set them up on Rackspace for email. I like Rackspace because they have super talented tech support, and because you can choose between Exchange or POP for each account at reasonable prices. They are in the same league with Amazon and MS.

MS has some good small business offerings these days, but I haven't used them myself.

Another good company is Hover.com. I use them for domain registration, and they are expanding into more services all the time

I'm fix'n to move their fairly simple website to SquareSpace.com, which is head and shoulders above most of the el-cheapo hosting companies for not a lot of money.
 
I have a couple of virtual machines on Host For Web that have been extremely reliable. I also have no blacklist problems because I actually bothered to take the 10 or 20 seconds it requires to set up rDNS etc., I disabled the mailman service, I rate-limit outgoing mail over a reasonable limit, and I filter all outgoing mail for spam and viruses. I've also fired a few clients for spamming over the years.

I've been very happy with Host For Web. I've been with them for a while and have no complaints. The truth, though, is that most hosting companies have their golden age, and then decline. Host For Web seems more stable than most I've dealt with.

I don't know if they offer shared hosting, and if they do, I have no experience with it. But if you're interested in running your own virtual machine, I feel pretty confident recommending them.

-Rich
 
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We host nearly 500 users at work with Rackspace, however if I were to do it over again, I'd use Office365 (wasn't available then)


Check out Office365. It's rock solid, and real Exchange. It's not significantly better than Rackspace, but it is about half the cost for an Exchange account.
 
Okay so I am going to sound like tinfoil hat guy -- but could I suggest two things:
1) You choose a webhost that is not in the United States
2) You start using GPG to encrypt all your email if you don't already

While it's unlikely that any government would directly spy on you to get information on your clients, which they would use in court... It is very likely that they would spy on you to get information about clients just to have for a rainy day.

Also let's ignore governments here for a second, I think it's quite clear by now that there isn't a "safe" server to use... so if someone wants to see the contents of your email they will get it, and if you have client information or /anything/ embarrassing that you share over email it will get back to you. Look at Stratfor.

So now that is out of the way, I really like using BuyVM (which is a Canadian company but has it's servers in the US, so meh)... or another awesome choice is OVH who have a strong record of protecting their clients and are not a US based company.

Also, and hopefully it doesn't negate what is said above, I do consulting for secure communication platforms and development. I don't work hourly, I work weekly and during that/those week(s) I am 100% dedicated to your company as if it were my own with no distractions. PM for details.
 
Office365. It's so much better than it was a year ago. I've been on it with my company (25 users) for two years now. Initially it was a pita to migrate too. However I've done two migrations for clients this week without much issues at all. It's a good product. Oh, with the small business premium you get licenses for office 2013 and office 2011 for Mac for each user account that can be installed on five devices each. They also have web space for your site included.
 
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teamcoltra said:
Okay so I am going to sound like tinfoil hat guy -- but could I suggest two things:
1) You choose a webhost that is not in the United States
2) You start using GPG to encrypt all your email if you don't already

While it's unlikely that any government would directly spy on you to get information on your clients, which they would use in court... It is very likely that they would spy on you to get information about clients just to have for a rainy day.

Also let's ignore governments here for a second, I think it's quite clear by now that there isn't a "safe" server to use... so if someone wants to see the contents of your email they will get it, and if you have client information or /anything/ embarrassing that you share over email it will get back to you. Look at Stratfor.

So now that is out of the way, I really like using BuyVM (which is a Canadian company but has it's servers in the US, so meh)... or another awesome choice is OVH who have a strong record of protecting their clients and are not a US based company.

Also, and hopefully it doesn't negate what is said above, I do consulting for secure communication platforms and development. I don't work hourly, I work weekly and during that/those week(s) I am 100% dedicated to your company as if it were my own with no distractions. PM for details.
Click to expand...

PGP would slow the NSA down by about .000000001 milliseconds. Where the servers are located is even less relevant.
 
Adam there is absolutely no question with your email. Use Google Apps.
 
bartmc said:
PGP would slow the NSA down by about .000000001 milliseconds. Where the servers are located is even less relevant.
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Care to cite something supporting that?
 
Henning said:
The entire Internet runs through Carnivore, NSA gets everything.
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It took the Feds many years and a lot of dollars to take down silk roads. And that was a very high profile target.
 
jesse said:
It took the Feds many years and a lot of dollars to take down silk roads. And that was a very high profile target.
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Two and a half years? That's nothing in the perspective of evidence gathering by the FBI. They probably started gathering the evidence about 5 minutes after it became an operation.
 
So, why doesn't the NSA offer website & email hosting? I mean...they're storing all that data anyway!

It'd eliminate a step and provide them with some income.

Win, win.

;)
 
bartmc said:
You don't have to crack PGP to read encrypted emails.

Snowden's response: "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/edwa...on-works-against-the-nsa-2013-6#ixzz2mmurSteP
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Riight but such things take effort and certainly take more than a millionth of a second to sort out.
 
Henning said:
Two and a half years? That's nothing in the perspective of evidence gathering by the FBI. They probably started gathering the evidence about 5 minutes after it became an operation.
Click to expand...

It took a significant amount of effort and resources to pull off and even given that was still a hell of a technical challenge.

Yes the NSA and the Feds are powerful but they can't just insta hack everything, like some people seem to think.

At the end of the day the reason they actually nailed the Silk Roads leader wasn't because they insta hacked him it was because he became complacent and made a few mistakes that lead them to him. Not because they clicked the instant root button.
 
jesse said:
Yes the NSA and the Feds are powerful but they can't just insta hack everything, like some people seem to think.
Click to expand...

It doesn't matter what they can do, the perception of the all-knowing goverment is enough for their purposes.
 
jesse said:
Riight but such things take effort and certainly take more than a millionth of a second to sort out.
Click to expand...

I was being facetious with my .00000000001 millisecond "fact". Point being you can hire an armored car to deliver your mail, it doesn't do much good if they just drop it in your mailbox and leave it there unattended.
 
bartmc said:
I was being facetious with my .00000000001 millisecond "fact". Point being you can hire an armored car to deliver your mail, it doesn't do much good if they just drop it in your mailbox and leave it there unattended.
Click to expand...

Poor analogy. I can defend my laptop from a virtual attack much easier than I can defend my mailbox. One would be significantly easier for the government to attack.
 
jesse said:
It took the Feds many years and a lot of dollars to take down silk roads. And that was a very high profile target.
Click to expand...

That's because they wanted the person who ran it, not because they didn't know what was passing through it.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
jesse said:
At the end of the day the reason they actually nailed the Silk Roads leader wasn't because they insta hacked him it was because he became complacent and made a few mistakes that lead them to him. Not because they clicked the instant root button.
Click to expand...

He paid an undercover agent to have someone killed. That meant if they had an undercover agent that close to him, they knew who he was for a long time. What they needed was something to put him away with. Just operating Silk Roads wasn't anything that would lock him up. They wanted to lock him up to make a point... "Don't act like we don't exist."

If he hadn't decided murder was a good option to solve his personal problems, they'd still be waiting.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
bartmc said:
That's on linode, owner of Linode is a POA member. I wouldn't even consider anyone else.
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WHAT!? Is there a PoA discount? :D

Been loving my Linode for the past few months.
 
I use TUFFMAIL for the email. They have pretty aggressive spam filtering and the site works well with both IMAP/POP and they have a half a dozen web mail clients available.

My websites are hosted between one of the local providers (SITELUTIONS) and GODADDY.
 
Either Google Apps (preferred) or Office 365 if you really like to use Outlook.
 
Word of warning on O365 or any "cloud" service. Our company was notified that their hosted O365 for thousands of users would be upgraded in the middle of a business day and out of service during the upgrade for an indeterminate period of time.

Negotiations with MSFT to move it to a more reasonable time for the company as a whole were not just ignored, they were rebuffed. You are NOT the customer and we don't care when you want it done.

They also claimed the entire cut over would take hours in the single digits. There were shared mailboxes inaccessible to numerous staff who rely on those for at least 48 hours because it took that long to migrate all the users from one platform to another even after assurances that would not happen.

- Middle of the busiest business day of the quarter.
- Wouldn't delay or change maintenance window upon request.
- Disconnected users from critical mailboxes.
- And... Didn't give a **** what we wanted.

That's O365 for ya.

The people at the parent company who wanted it chose it because it was easier than fixing their Exchange mess they'd let get completely out of hand, worldwide. So they got a reprieve by moving everyone off the old infrastructure, but they replaced it with a non-responsive vendor who charges a lot of money every year for the service and doesn't care if you want them to manage the platform in a way conducive to your business. They also get to say it's always patched and updated and they don't have to worry about it anymore, and just blame the vendor (something they love to do) if something like this happens or goes wrong.

Whether it's saving the company money or not, I'm not privvy to those numbers. But it's sure not a good user experience to be down mid-business-day for upgrades.
 
Google Apps or Microsoft's 365 hosting. POP just doesn't cut it anymore. We have hundreds of clients (mostly law offices), using many different providers. I can safely say NO provider is without it's problems. Email is a complex thing, involving hundreds of obscure protocols, passing through thousands of servers, using hundreds of different client programs. Add to that the problems caused by spam and virus filtering (and humans), and you have a mess... that, surprisingly, works. Usually.
Something like Google Apps or Microsoft's hosting is the way to go... it handles the "mobile lifestyle" that you are undoubtedly moving towards- multiple devices, phones, tablets, traveling, multiple computers, etc. And they incorporate Contacts and Calendars.
It's very difficult to suggest hosting your own Email anymore. Anyone who does is probably one of those geek guys you want to stay away from. The exposure you open yourself to by just having an IP address going into your firm is not worth it. Add to that the expense of properly handling security and Spam/Virus filtering... forget it.

PS... troubleshooting email problems can be difficult, but can usually be successful. You have to put metrics in place, and can't just rely on extemporaneous mumblings by end-users. I see your domain ISN'T listed on any of the Worldwide spam lists. or at least, not when I checked. The problem can be anywhere from server settings, to client settings, to user settings for spam or rules that have been setup. Troubleshooting email problems takes some time, and must be done on a message by message basis. You need cooperation from end-to-end, because you need to check the message as it transfers through the system. Check everything, and don't rely on end-users. I can't tell you how many email problems that I've "fixed", that turned out to be wrong address, a space, or a 500 MB attachment.
 
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CT4ME said:
I can't tell you how many email problems that I've "fixed", that turned out to be wrong address, a space, or a 500 MB attachment.
Click to expand...

Dude. Last week someone had me hunt down their all so important bulk message that they typed ".co" instead of ".com" on the TO line and freaked their ass out that their mail didn't arrive to the group distro.

They, of course, couldn't find this out themselves looking carefully at their Sent folder, they had to throw a hissy fit to management and up and over the silos to bonk me on the head. Must be the mail system that's processing thousands of other messages just fine and would alert me if it weren't. (Bang head here.)

The "Reply To All" with the snippet from the log file showing their typo was pretty sweet. At least two senior VPs learned they hired a moron, I suppose. Not because they made the mistake. Those happen. But because of how they handled it.

Frakking Chicken Little.
 
We changed over to Exchange Server hosted in house, and it is backed up every night. Best we've ever had it. Good IT providers, very proactive, readily available. Not cheap, but good and local, and they speak English.
 
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