The hosting providor we use at work, Intermedia, has shown us once again what their customer service and technical support is worth. One of my coleagues spent the last week researching our options for doing a mass mailout to our customers (they did ask to receive this “promotional mailing”). Historically, we have been limited to 200 messages per hour when we send them locally, but according to their knowledge base we could send 3000 messages per hour if we do it from the website. So, he wrote an application that would send 1000 messages per hour and then sleep until the next hour. What Intermedia fails to mention is that they also put the 200 email limit on sending emails from the website.

So, what’s so bad about that? Well, instead of not allowing more than 200 messages, instead they raise an internal flag in their logs. If enough flags are raised, it will automatically shut down our entire account with them. No warnings, no calls to see what is going on, no website, no email, no control panel for our account. Everything just gets shut off. Jeremy was monitoring his mailing program, and noticed that our entire website shut off as soon as it happened.

We host 6 accounts with this company, and this is just the latest in a string of gaffs that is getting under my skin. We really need to switch. Too bad we don’t have the time to rewrite all of our websites to use MySQL and PHP, so I could get them onto Blue Host, the company that is hosting this website. Granted, I have only been with them for a few weeks, but I haven’t had any troubles yet.