I've had minor issues, mainly heaps and heaps of spam on my email, but nothing really horrible. I came in on march 25th to the boss complaining about bounced emails. I searched all around and just figured it was another jackass on the shared server at HG that got the IP on a blacklist.
No, it was HG blacklisting MX guarddog's IP. They are a great spam filter that Joe pointed me to that took those heaps (900+ in one day sometimes) of spam and brought it down to one in the last 3 months. In HG's infinite wisdom they internally blacklisted the one thing that's helping with the ton of spam.
Here is a breakdown of what went down. (http://mxguarddog.com/blog/hostgator-blocking-your-mail/)
Not surprised. I've finally moved all of the sites I take care of away from Hostgator. The last support case I had with them took 11 days for them to even respond. And then they asked for information that I had already provided in the original ticket. I replied back that they already had that info. It took them 27 days to respond to that one. G-A-M-E O-V-E-R at that point. The last site I had with them I found that at the time I moved away from them they had over 1,300 hosting accounts on that one server.
Ohhhhh...kinda? That is being generous to those asshats!~
So what's your go-to host now?
They really aren't annoying enough for me to bother switching but if have to create another site for the solar place I'd it rather not be with them.
CROCWEB (https://www.crocweb.com) out of Canada.
I've been using them for about a year and any time I need support, only if I just need to ask a question, I get a reply back within an hour. They are far and above Hostgator...even when Hostgator was good.
Crocweb. I like that name.
crikey
Just a thought, not claiming to be right,wrong, or ???
Host your site(s) with a different company then your email services.
I had used HostGator just to host our company Wordpress - website, along with a few others...but recently changed to SiteGround for this - https://www.siteground.com/web-hosting.htm (mainly due to some billing errors/increases, & responsiveness).
Never used email services from any of these companies, as we use the 'google apps for business' and have been very happy with uptime and spam filtering with them...(yeah, it will cost 'about' $50 per user per year for google apps....but sure saves a lot of headaches) (BTW - I used to admin & host our email servers in-house, and I'm glad to have 'some' of my sanity back by letting the 'goog' do it for me (us)).
That is something I have thought of. We use google and have for years for the car shop and it works great (and free because grandfathered). I do have a little worry of having the goog sniff all my email but you can't really avoid that now.
Couldn't agree more with keeping email away from your hosting account. It is a nightmare 24/7 anymore.
I did switch one of the sites I admin over to Google apps since they only have two users. Google is expensive though at either $5.00 or $10.00 per month per user.
In May we are switching our work emails over to Rackspace. Since we have about 40 email accounts it would run us $200 per month ($5.00 per month per user) with Google but Rackspace is only $2.00 per month per user
The boss won't kick in any money for something that is "free". He is notorious for fixing things himself and while sometimes it works out most of the time it ends up either costing more in tools/materials or time. To save $60 on replacing a motor on the HVAC he ended up wasting 12 hours on a Sunday. He may love being here (because all his toys are here) but I sure as hell don't. I place a high value on my time outside the 8-4 m-f I'm here.
<insert-jackassian> The ol' "Nuffin's Ever Free" and/or "You Get What You Pay For" ICON </insert-jackassian>
Right now we use the hosting email for outbound. For inbound we use a service like MxGuardDog called Mailroute but you still have to have email accounts on the hosting email server and as you found out with MxGuardDog it is easy to have problems no matter how good that service is. That is costing us about $850 per year. They have outbound services as well but not if you are on shared hosting so that is why we are switching to Rackspace. So instead of paying $850 per year for spam filtering we will be spending about $960 per year for both Inbound and outbound that includes spam filtering and virus protection. The email fight is becoming more and more difficult. Especially if you are on shared hosting where any old site on the server can get the IP address blacklisted. That has happened way too many times in the last year and we can't continue to have disruptions in our email. Or not being able to send to certain domains. Or having domains blacklist us. Right now we cannot send email to anyone at the Army Corps of Engineers which is a big deal here. We are a news organization so this just can't keep happening.
I may have to consider moving our email off HG. We have issues with some domains but seeing as it's mainly the boss's personal email I'm not too bothered to fix it.