> One of the companies I'm looking at throws in up to 50Mb of list traffic
> per month with the basic Web hosting deal, then charges $US 13 for every
> 50Mb extra of list traffic. On the basis of an average message size of
> 3.4Kb, those 50Mb would come out to just over $17 on Lyris's rate plan.
>
> Compare this with the average Web hosting service. A lot of providers these
> days will allow you 5Gb of monthly data transfer - ie 100 x 50 Mb - in a
> basic $50 package. If I've not screwed up the calculations, that's about 4%
> of the first figure I quoted, and about 3% of the second. Why such a big
> difference?
Mailing lists are strange creatures =o)
Partially, I'm sure, its a straight supply/demand thing. Web hosting has
become easy to do, pre-config'd packages make it easy for virtually anyone
(no pun intended!) to offer virtual hosting and lots of bells and whistles
with no technical know-how at all. The demand for mailing lists has not
been nearly as great, and has generally not been from the same sort of
technically challenged audience. Anyone can put up a website, and feel
that they've accomplished something, even if it only gets three hits a
month (and that's when they log in to check their counter). Not everyone
can pull together a viable mailing list. People will charge what they
think the market will support. If you cannot or will not run a list for
yourself, and cannot or will not use a free service, what are you willing
to pay?
Economics aside, I've also heard other concerns about running mailing
lists. Some providers are afraid of the possibly bad exposure lists can
be. What if the client loads his/her SPAM database and uses the list to
sent junk mail? The residual nightmare of getting off of various people's
"black hole" lists could be frightening.
Leaving the realm of paranoia, list servers can be a pain to manage, even
if the individual list managers do a fairly good job of watching over
their own lists. Error volume is a factor: misdirected mail that users
inevitably send from time to time to the server's "main" address rather
than the individual list owner's address, etc etc etc.
> I also find it strange that there are other services which charge a flat
> monthly fee (in the case of Esosoft <http://www.esosoft.com/mailinglist/>
> as low as $5 a month), but with no volume-related charges at all. I wonder
> what the economics of those services are?
There are services that do the same for web hosting. They usually have
some exceptions or exclusions (strict AUP, for instance). The idea is
that if your flat fee attracts enough people, averages will work in your
favor since most web sites really only get a negligable amount of traffic.
This probably carries over into the world of lists to some extent: lists
tend to self-manage their volume. It has been my *general* observation
that high volume discussion lists have fewer members than low volume
distribution lists, but their total bandwidth consumption can be pretty
much the same. There are exceptions... but hopefully the averages play
out once again.
> My hunch is that the field of mailing list hosting has not yet seen the
> kind of competitive shakedown that has taken place in the Web hosting
> sector.
I think you're correct, but I also really don't foresee it happening
anytime soon, if at all. Is this a mass-appeal industry? Hardly. Do the
big players, with the potential for big lists, have the $$ to either do it
themselves or outsource? Generally, yes. That doesn't breed really
intense competition, IMHO.
--jenni "benji" baier
