Some 6 weeks ago, when I questioned the price of mail services compared to that of various hosting providers, someone on this list defended the pricing suggesting that a "purpose built email system" was more reliable than a hosting account with "email tossed in". Well, my experience thus far (two months) with TUCOWS email is that it is certainly no more reliable than cheap POP accounts from a hosting provider. And without features like domain aliasing and multiple-box aliases that many of the hosting providers offer.
I'm currently looking at setting up a Linux/Sendmail or Win 2k3/POP server and hiding it behind the MX Logic service (Email Defense) since I was under the impression that the multi-hour outages were not due to email defense. Am I being naive? Perhaps. But the _small_ exchange servers we manage for our larger clients have been humming along without incident for over a year. I know, 100 boxes and 20k messages peak day is no big deal. But being bigger and having to process more mail is no excuse - my hotmail and yahoo accounts have given me very little trouble in the 8 or so years I've had them, and each is orders of magnitude larger than TUCOWS. In order to meet the 99.99% uptime I bought into, a rough calculation using today's outage alone would suggest I can expect uninterrupted service for the next 5 years or so. Where did the four-nines reliability figure come from? The first few days the service was offered? Some marketing guy thought it looked good? TUCOWS should either justify that figure or change it on their site. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Maynard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "David Maynard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 1:21 PM Subject: Reliability problems with email service > We have a few customers using the Tucows mailbox service which is advertised > to have "99.99%" availability (taken from the service description on > rrc.tucows.com). This morning, their email stopped working again for at > least the 3rd or 4th time in the past two months. As with previous times, > the expected outage duration is several hours in the middle of the North > American workday. At this point, some of them are calling us to ask why > their email service is so unreliable and are asking for alternate providers. > > I understand that it is VERY hard to provide highly-available email services > in the current Internet environment. We manage an email system for another > customer that supports 5000 users and processes over 200K messages per day > with virus and (limited) spam filtering. That system is small compared to > any big-name email providers, but it is still hard as heck to keep things > running smoothly. However, in spite of some serious scalability problems on > that customer's current backend system (IMail), we have managed to achieve > better availability than the Tucows service. > > We don't (currently) offer our own in-house email service because it is so > hard to do well, but at this point, we could offer significantly better > uptimes by throwing up a single server with a RAID drive and keeping spare > hardware on hand. > > I really need a better story to tell our current Tucows email customers. > Can they expect the current service problems to continue for the foreseeable > future or are there real reasons why they should expect things to improve? > We have other customers asking us for spam filtering services that I would > prefer to point to the Email Defense service, but I can't recommend it given > the multi-hour outages that happen every few weeks. > > Otherwise, we continued to be thrilled with the other Tucows services we > sell (DNS and certificates). > > -- > David P. Maynard > OutServ.net, Inc. -- Coordinated IT Operations Solutions > Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Tel: +1 512 977 8918, Fax: +1 512 853 9476 > -- > >
