On Sat, 4 Sep 2010, Paul Grenyer wrote:

I'm very happy with gmail.

A slight caution... gmail uses servers outside the UK, and therefore is not bound by the protections for users' privacy contained in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. See the mailing list thread starting at <http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/pipermail/alpine-info/2010-August/003532.html>. I'm guessing gmail is not alone in this. -- HTH, Dan

Hi Ted I have used 1and1 for along while now and really have found no problems with them at all, also find there support is really good as well. Regards Ian On Monday, September 6, 2010, Ted Harding <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

Just a follow-up to my original request. Following Bev's suggestion of 1and1, I had a wee look at them and decided to sign up to their "Instant Email" hosting account. Tests so far show that it seems to run well and slickly. A bit of trouble (probably self-inflicted) in setting up the IMAP at my end, but soon rectified. I'll be jumping it through some hoops over the next few days.

When I'm ready to migrate fully to that service I'll let it be known.

Best wishes to all, Ted.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 06-Sep-10                                       Time: 18:31:38 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

_______________________________________________ main@lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe?  See message headers or the web site above!

-- King regards Ian Porter www: www.codingfriends.com

-- King regards Ian Porter www: www.codingfriends.com d no

...

problems with them at all, also find there support is really good as well.

And I used them for years too. Their email package is OK. But they do have a habit of "upgrading" their offering and leaving existing customers languishing on older packages. They also gave (and are giving) me grief on domain management.

For example. I wanted to add a new subdomain to one of my domains (I have nine with them at the moment and one with bytemark - guess where the rest are going) and discovered that I couldn't. 1and1 advertise 5 subdomains as being available (in itself a crappy limit) per domain. In fact, this limit applies per "package" and I happened to have registered all my domains to one package. In aggregate I had already used 5 subdomains. I complained and was told that the only way they could give my the 5 subdomains  was by my transferring each domain to its own individual package. This meant that I had to go through their domain transfer process on-line but simply say "existing 1and1 customer" at the "transfer from" section. Bizarre, but this shouild simply be an accounting change.

I did as advised.

Guess what. I have received bills for new domain regsitrations for each of my nine .net domains (@ £8.99 pa) from the date of this change. Those domains (already with 1and1 remember) do not expire until next January. I have complained and am still waiting for even the courtesy of a reply.

At best this is simply poor administration, but it looks like very sharp practice to me.

If you choose to go to 1and1, do not register a domain you care about with them. (Last year I "lost" one domain for eleven days as I transferred it from 1and1 to bytemark).

Tbh, I have found the opposite because I was with another hosting company and they messed up my domain records and thus I moved everything over to 1and1 and they did not bill me until that domain was up for renewal, and would not move away from 1and1 at present just due to other companies doing such a bad job.. weird how everyone gets different opinions of companies. Oh yeah.. when the other company messed up my domain, 1and1 helped me out even though it was not there fault at all, and thus that is why I moved hosting and domains to them. Regards Ian

Mick

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?

Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

-- King regards Ian Porter www: www.codingfriends.com

On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 11:10:55AM +0100, James Bensley wrote:

Weird indeed! At $dayjob, when I arrived they were with 1and1, 1and1 lost all our DNS records and their tech support was a far away call centre who didn't even know what I was talking about...Moved to daily.co.uk and never looked back, I highly recommend them (well for domain and DNS management anyway as thats all we use them for).

Weirdly I'm currently involved in a change to a DNS record for someone who is with 1and1, the change has been made twice and both times has reverted back to the old address overnight, they're now in the process of approaching support. Adam -- New signature required, suggestions on a post card please.

Adam Bower wrote:

On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 11:10:55AM +0100, James Bensley wrote:

...

Weird indeed! At $dayjob, when I arrived they were with 1and1, 1and1 lost all our DNS records and their tech support was a far away call centre [...] Weirdly I'm currently involved in a change to a DNS record for someone who is with 1and1, the change has been made twice and both times has reverted back to the old address overnight, they're now in the process of approaching support.

Yes, sorry to the 1&1 fans, but the co-op's clients have had problems with them more than once in the past. I hold them about the same as Plesk: not impossible to work with, but I won't recommend them to anyone and I'm quite happy when clients replace them. I think we have one client who still uses 1and1. Hope the above DNS problems are all resolved soon! -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 07/09/2010 13:43, mick wrote:

So far we have recommendations for daily and mythic-beasts (thanks Brett) and possibly dyndns (if my assumption about samwise Peter's domain is correct).

I confess to a preference for a UK based company. I want full DNS control (all records, including NS should I wish to point to another server) and no silly restrictions on the numbers of subdomains. So, any other recommendations chaps?

Are you after end-to-end Registrar services (i.e. register and manage subdomains in one place) or a DNS service for domains you have registered? If the latter, then why not use Bytemark? Or is that just one too many eggs in the same basket? I've managed a handful of domains, with a whole heap of arbitrary subdomains and all the other MX stuff, for about 7 years via Bytemark's trivial DNS management, and never had any issues (that weren't my own fault). There's no fancy GUI, just a TinyDNS file which you can upload any time. Simon - -- ====================================================================== Simon Ransome http://nosher.net Photo RSS Feed: http://nosher.net/images/images.rss -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.14 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkyGOfYACgkQ8tdcY+OcZZyqRwCcDBZuKetplOHU5z7wdpER6ez+ 23MAn21rlDGMrjxcdZXmWThTIhTPAdmF =goBa -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

mick wrote:

[...] To be honest, I'm also not sure of the implication of moving registrar without taking the new registrar's DNS services (I spy room for loss of service in confusion over who holds the NS records)

It shouldn't be a problem, but it sometimes is: Network Solutions, FastHosts and Logic Boxes (and their resellers) have caused most problems in my experience, linking domain registration with other services when they can. Most other registrars cope fine. If anyone would like a self-service domain registration account under the co-op's reseller account, ask on http://www.software.coop/contact/ You'll manage settings yourself and pay cost price, but the benefit is that I think when we reach sufficient volume, everyone's prices should fall - co-operation is good for everyone. Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former lecturer. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire for various work http://www.software.coop/products/

If you choose to go to 1and1, do not register a domain you care about with them. (Last year I "lost" one domain for eleven days as I transferred it from 1and1 to bytemark).

Mick

The one thing I do pay over the odds for is DNS management. I don't mind skimping on the site hosting, at the cost of some downtime if something goes wrong but as I'd really not want to risk losing my small number of names, I use a large well-established US company which also provides a fantastic web interface that allows customisation of names down to SRV records etc. I'd rather do that than go with one of the smaller UK companies advertising domains for much cheaper but who can cause real problems if they go under or even just stop responding to support requests. Getting them back through Nominet or whoever would take time to go through the process, and I'd shudder to think what you could do if it wasn't your name in the WHOIS record, which I've heard has been an issue with some companies in the past - registering the names in their own name, rather than yours. Anyway, I hope you get your situation sorted out eventually, Mick. Peter.

On Tue, 7 Sep 2010 12:15:35 +0100 Brett Parker <iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk> allegedly wrote:

...

Guess what. I have received bills for new domain regsitrations for each of my nine .net domains (@ £8.99 pa) from the date of this change. Those domains (already with 1and1 remember) do not expire until next January. I have complained and am still waiting for even the courtesy of a reply.

If that's for .co.uk, that's damned expensive...

They are .net domains. And that price seems about the going rate.

I tend to do domain/dns at mythic-beasts (they took over the hosting from Black Cat Networks), they're reasonable, and the DNS interface is actually fairly good. Certainly, that's who I recommend for DNS hosting these days. (Basically all services are then on a VPS that was with Blue Linux, but is now also part of Mythic Beasts... but then, I like having a VPS that I can control for these things...)

Thanks Brett, I'll certainly consider them. See my other response. Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks Mick (and Paul and Martin) for suggestions. Mick: I'm with you on your various points -- see below. On 04-Sep-10 19:50:02, mick wrote:

On Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:41:55 +0100 (BST) (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> allegedly wrote:

...

I'm therefore asking if poeple can recommend a provider of email hosting on which I could have an account with IMAP access. I would want this to be of high quality and reliability and capable of handling high levels of incoming traffic (for various reasons, I can get up to 500 emails a day -- most of which I delete on the basis of the Subject alone, some others after a quick look at content, leaving typically some 5-10% to download; so I need to be able to do this quickly).

Ted

I tend to agree with Martin's (rather terse) response.

I run my own mail server (but I prefer postfix to exim) with dovecot for pop/imap access (no squirelmail because I think webmail is an abomination). I run this on a VPS at bytemark. They aren't the cheapest VPS provider around, but others on this list use them and can probably confirm that they are good guys.

I don't want to run my own mailserver (except perhaps experimentally, but I would be "down" from time to time; and in any case I don't have time in the present circumstances to experiment).

I used 1and1 for my mail for many years and whilst they are OK, I have had several arguments with them about domain management and I am in the process of moving even that away from them.

My only clear recommendation would be to avoid at all costs any "free" email providers (google, MS, yahoo etc). Whilst they may at first sight appear attractive, you have no contractual rights to the service. Worse, in some cases such as google, the bastards scan your email in order to profile you.

Absolutely! In addition, in the case of one mailing list I have a lot to do with (r-help@r-project.org), their server runs spam checks which (for fairly sound reasons) are sensitive to the presence of "gmail.com" anywhere in the headers; such mail may then be held for moderation before going out to the list. So, if mail were delivered to me via gmail and I replied to it, it would tend to be trapped.

If you don't want the hassle of running your own mail server, I'd suggest you look to pay for a service in the £10-£20 per year range. That should give you at least a dozen mailboxes and around a gig of store with pop and imap access.

That is exactly the sort of thing I am looking for, and would welcome recommendations! Thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 04-Sep-10 Time: 22:07:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

Oh dear, I thought I was asking a straightforward question! See below. On 05-Sep-10 11:55:32, Brett Parker wrote:

On 04 Sep 18:41, Ted Harding wrote:

...

Hi Folks, Since it appears that Manchester University has taken a decision that its retired folk shall now be obsolete, email-wise, it is very likely that my current email account will be de-activated soon (I'm already using it on borrowed time). So I shall be looking for a new email address.

I'm very happy (in terms of general quality of service) with my ISP (Zen) and would not want to change. However, Zen's email only offers POP3 download and does not offer IMAP access. The webmail interface is clunky and slow, so preliminary sampling and deletion of delivered emails would be very tedious. On the other hand, previewing using IMAP (when it works properly) is very fast.

I'm therefore asking if poeple can recommend a provider of email hosting on which I could have an account with IMAP access. I would want this to be of high quality and reliability and capable of handling high levels of incoming traffic (for various reasons, I can get up to 500 emails a day -- most of which I delete on the basis of the Subject alone, some others after a quick look at content, leaving typically some 5-10% to download; so I need to be able to do this quickly).

Recommendations?

As it appears that you're going to want a webmail system as well, then the current usual would be gmail (note, however, that I don't trust gmail with my mail, but mail for the company I'm currently contracting for all goes via gmail, so meh).

No, I don't particularly want a webmail system! The point about Zen & webmail is that with Zen it is either the webmail interface or pulling the mail (in entirety) by POP3. I've used the webmail interface only when I've had to (e.g. the Manchester server was down and I've asked people to temporarily send to my Zen address instead). I want IMAP as my standard access method. Also (as I've since explained) I don't want google either (for the reasons you state below, Brett, and for other reasons too).

As the addage goes, though, you get whats you pay for, so if you've got no problems with the evil that is google indexing all your mail and using it to advertise at you, then that's the way forwards... if you really care about your mail, then the right way forwards is to setup your own mail server (or get a domain and a friend that has a well setup mailserver, and pay for some of their time/resources). [...]

As I've also since explained, my time is short and I don't want to get involved at this moment in experimenting with setting up my own domain and mail server! The question was simple (see above): 2I'm therefore asking if poeple can recommend a provider of email hosting on which I could have an account with IMAP access. I would want this to be of high quality and reliability ... " So, whom do people recommend? (I'm quite willing to pay ... ) Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 05-Sep-10 Time: 14:21:16 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

On 05-Sep-10 13:49:22, Martin A. Brooks wrote:

On Sun, September 5, 2010 14:21, Ted Harding wrote:

...

No, I don't particularly want a webmail system! The point about Zen & webmail is that with Zen it is either the webmail interface or pulling the mail (in entirety) by POP3. I've used the webmail interface only when I've had to (e.g. the Manchester server was down and I've asked people to temporarily send to my Zen address instead). I want IMAP as my standard access method.

I think you're a little bit confused. Webmail is just an interface to your mailstore presented via a web browser. If you're underlying mailstore is IMAP, then your webmail client will use IMAP.

Excuse me but I understand this perfectly well. My original (and since repated) point is that my ISP (Zen) offer *only* webmail interface and POP3. They do *NOT* offer IMAP. The webmail interface is impossibly slow and clunky[**] for the quantity of mail I receive. I want to be able to use IMAP on my *local* email client (at home) to pre-scan and possibly read mail while it is still on the provider's server, delete as desired (usually most of it) and then use IMAP to download it to my local machine. This is exactly what I have been using for years with my Manchester email account, which is about to be closed down. Therefore the email hosting service that I have been asking for recommendations for must run IMAP, and, as I have said, offer high quality and reliability of service. It's a very straightforward question, and is not answered by recommendations to use methods which either I can not use, or which I find impossibly tedious to use, with my ISP.

I access my email from a web browser, from my iPhone, from Thunderbird on my netbook and probably a few more. It's all done via IMAP.

When I access Zen's webmail via a browser: a) clicking on an email to read it leads to a few seconds delay before it appears on the screen. b) After reading, I click on "Inbox" to return to the inbox display leads to anything up to 30 seconds delay (depending on how much is there) before the inbox list is displayed again. c) Marking mails for deletion, then clicking on the "wastebasket" leads to similar delays before completion. And, as stated, I can no have IMAP access to my mail on Zen. Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 05-Sep-10 Time: 15:27:30 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

Sorry Bev - hit send befor I remembered to change the 'to:' field Bev Nicolson wrote:

I hesitate, since I am no geek, but 1&1 do email hosting for what looks like a sensible price. Would that be any good Ted?

http://order.1and1.co.uk/links/email-hosting.html

As do Paston, which is accessible to visitors - in Norwich. I haven't had any complaints in the admittedly quite short time I've been with them, and they actually know about Linux and, unless I'm much mistaken, operate on it. -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

Brett Parker wrote:

On 05 Sep 16:56, Anthony Anson wrote:

...

Sorry Bev - hit send befor I remembered to change the 'to:' field

Bev Nicolson wrote:

...

I hesitate, since I am no geek, but 1&1 do email hosting for what looks like a sensible price. Would that be any good Ted?

http://order.1and1.co.uk/links/email-hosting.html As do Paston, which is accessible to visitors - in Norwich.

I haven't had any complaints in the admittedly quite short time I've been with them, and they actually know about Linux and, unless I'm much mistaken, operate on it.

Certainly the mail system *used* to be hosted on a linux box, I know because I did the config for it many moons ago. Since then the mail has been shifted off to one of Rackspace's managed services (take a look at the address for mail.paston.co.uk, and then whois the IP...). I'm sure there's a Paston employee on list, somewhere, though - but I'd guess they're not going to admit it on list!

The support staff are generally fantastic though.

I've always found they knew exactly what I didn't. -- Tony Anson www.girolle.co.uk/

Gmail; Its free, 7.5GBs of space, and it offers POP and IMAP and obviously a Web interface...Also it has many sorting features built in for organising large volumes of mail, I get about 250 +/- emails a day, no worries with Gmail! -- Regards, James. http://www.jamesbensley.co.cc/ There are 10 kinds of people in the world; Those who understand Vigesimal, and J others...?

On 5 September 2010 17:33, mick <mbm@rlogin.net> wrote:

On Sun, 5 Sep 2010 17:20:55 +0100 James Bensley <jwbensley@gmail.com> allegedly wrote:

...

Gmail;

Its free,

TANSTAAFL

Mick

Keeping in context with the ops mention of willing to pay, as in hard currency, its obvious I meant free as in £0 -- Regards, James. http://www.jamesbensley.co.cc/ There are 10 kinds of people in the world; Those who understand Vigesimal, and J others...?

On 5 September 2010 18:00, Ted Harding <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

All very well, but I shall avoid gmail. It tends to trigger the spam filters on one of my principle mailing-lists if "gmail.com" is anywhere in the headers, leading to positings being held for moderation -- even if not posting via gmail but only replying to a posting which already bears traces of gmail! Ted.

Wow, thats quite a strong move considering they are such a massive supplier of free email accounts. -- Regards, James. http://www.jamesbensley.co.cc/ There are 10 kinds of people in the world; Those who understand Vigesimal, and J others...?

On 5 September 2010 18:24, James Bensley <jwbensley@gmail.com> wrote:

Wow, thats quite a strong move considering they are such a massive supplier of free email accounts.

Indeed, and as a Google Apps/Gmail user I do not wish to be tagged as an undesirable. I do not go around self-moderating or banning people using BT Internet or Virgin Media broadband because I consider them to host tons of spambots and malware because households using those services can't be arsed to patch/update their Windows boxes or use decent anti-virus. Regards, Martyn

On 5 September 2010 18:00, Ted Harding <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

On 05-Sep-10 16:20:55, James Bensley wrote:

...

Gmail;

All very well, but I shall avoid gmail. It tends to trigger the spam filters on one of my principle mailing-lists if "gmail.com" is anywhere in the headers, leading to positings being held for moderation

You could use them as somewhere to store your incoming mail, and then use your preferred ISP as an SMTP relay when sending email. As you're not sending via GMail, you won't get any GMail headers in the emails you send ... Greg

On 05-Sep-10 15:11:37, mick wrote:

On Sun, 05 Sep 2010 14:21:19 +0100 (BST) (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> allegedly wrote:

...

The question was simple (see above): 2I'm therefore asking if poeple can recommend a provider of email hosting on which I could have an account with IMAP access. I would want this to be of high quality and reliability ... "

So, whom do people recommend? (I'm quite willing to pay ... ) Ted.

Ted I've personally never used them, but I've heard good things about fastmail. Similarly, whilst I have never used their email the provider of one of my VPSs (www.daily.co.uk) appear to offer pop/imap mail at a reasonable price. I can vouch for their cheap 'n cheerful VPS service because I have run a tor server with them for over a year with no hassle (and for a couple of quid for a month it might be worth trialling their email).

Thanks, Mick. fastmail and daily.co.uk both look interesting. I'll try to suss out whether their "data protection" conditions embody not doing a google-style scan of one's mails! I'll look into these -- but still open to recommendations!

I also found this comparison site

http://rffr.de/mail_providers

which discusses providers and also points to other comparison sites.

But, like Brett, I won't be going back to another provider. I prefer to trust me. Mick

Well, I may get round to "trusting me" sometime in the future, when I have time to look into setting it up. (And looking into the implications of the occasional power outages we get round here, sometimes lasting several hours). Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 05-Sep-10 Time: 16:27:44 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

On 05/09/10 14:21, (Ted Harding) wrote:

Oh dear, I thought I was asking a straightforward question! See below.

The question was simple (see above): 2I'm therefore asking if poeple can recommend a provider of email hosting on which I could have an account with IMAP access. I would want this to be of high quality and reliability ... "

So, whom do people recommend? (I'm quite willing to pay ... )

I know some consider them another evil empire but I've been using a yahoo address for years. Never had a problem with delivery, storage, usage. I use smtp to send and pop to access (via thunderbird) but I believe they allow an IMAP interface, as well as the dreadful webmail. I keep mails on their server for 30 days before deleting them to allow me to sync other machines. Currently 6500 mails on their server using about 6,5MB of storage. I don't know their limits but I've had over 15,000 mails on there without a problem. They're free, well I don't pay 'em anything. They you go. A simple recommendation, that you will probably ignore. regards nev

On Sun, 5 Sep 2010 18:38:23 +0100 Martyn Drake <martyn@drake.org.uk> allegedly wrote:

<advert> I should mention work for a company called Memset Ltd. (http://www.memset.com) and we provide both dedicated and virtual machines (based on Xen). Prices are cheaper than that of Bytemark, and we've been in the virtualisation game as long as their have - if not longer. Therefore if there anybody is looking for an alternative to Bytemark or similar, we may be able to help.</advert>

I feel I should mention that memset are the only UK based ISP I have approached who declined to let me run a tor node. They were polite, but clearly didn't want any possible hassle. I have run tor on bytemark, rapidswitch, tagadab, daily and thrust. I eventually settled on using daily and thrust simply because they offer the lowest prices for the highest bandwidth (750 and 1000 gig pcm respectively). Tor obeys a sort of network version of parkinson's law..... Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

On Sun, 5 Sep 2010 19:40:51 +0100 Martyn Drake <martyn@drake.org.uk> allegedly wrote:

On 5 September 2010 19:31, mick <mbm@rlogin.net> wrote:

...

I feel I should mention that memset are the only UK based ISP I have approached who declined to let me run a tor node. They were polite, but clearly didn't want any possible hassle.

I can't comment on that - was not involved in that decision or process at all. And also can't comment on individual circumstances either, not without permission from my employers. All I can say is that we don't turn down requests lightly without good reason.

Regards,

Martyn

Martyn Wasn't a criticism, merely an observation. As I said, the response I received to my query (from "Nathan") was polite, but in the negative. Many ISPs take the view that encrypted traffic tunneled through their infrastructure may cause them grief. In the US in particular, operating a tor exit node (as do I) can attract all sorts of unwelcome attention such as DMCA takedown notices. As advised by the tor community, I specifically post a notice on my tor nodes (see http://toroftheworld.aibohphobia.org ) which explains what tor is about. I have not had one complaint in nearly 18 months of tor operation. Mick --------------------------------------------------------------------- The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this? Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------

On Mon, Sep 06, 2010 at 10:00:34AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:

includes IMAP. http://www.software.coop/products/web/#hosting We monitor this and it shows 99.147% availability this year so far.

That's just over 2 days downtime, hopefully it wasn't all in one go. ;) Adam -- New signature required, suggestions on a post card please.

Brett Parker wrote:

On 06 Sep 10:25, Adam Bower wrote:

...

On Mon, Sep 06, 2010 at 10:00:34AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:

...

includes IMAP. http://www.software.coop/products/web/#hosting We monitor this and it shows 99.147% availability this year so far.

That's just over 2 days downtime, hopefully it wasn't all in one go. ;)

No, the above figure is email service *availability* (which seemed most relevant here) and not the host *uptime* which most sites state publicly - that's 99.96% and the 2h downtime so far was mostly due to a disk changeover and testing.

Of course, that's a totally useless statistic, it does not, for example, state wether the unavailability was due to scheduled maintainence etc.

I'd have thought better from a stats postgrad... ;)

Why? Stats postgrads think people on the R email lists should be able to cope with the unvarnished statistics. ;-) But seeing as someone's interested: I'm pretty sure the lost service time was all due to a hard disk failure that slowed the RAID array to the point where email service was intermittently unusuable (we use Maildir, which I think is more disk-intensive but lighter on memory), followed by scheduled weekend downtime to fit a new disk. There was a complication and finding and removing the disk that was timing out from RAID wasn't straightforward. Several high-priced *guaranteed* services I've seen only payout under 99%, so I don't think the co-op's *standard* hosting's email availability being over 99% is too bad. We've done better before and we'd've liked it to be better this year, but hardware failures occur at random. Following the above-mentioned problem, we've decided to replace other hardware in the near future and get it all back on kit that's under warranty. That runs counter to my usual "if it ain't broke..." attitude, but experience shows more recent servers are usually down less. Does anyone have suggestions for other actions that would push that uptime higher while keeping the cost reasonable? Thanks, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op

Adam Bower wrote:

On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 12:58:23AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:

...

No, the above figure is email service *availability* (which seemed most relevant here) and not the host *uptime* which most sites state publicly - that's 99.96% and the 2h downtime so far was mostly due to a disk changeover and testing.

I did read that and I have parsed it correctly, if the service isn't available it's down. Therefore, it is what I would class as downtime, if my email wasn't accessible for 2 days this year (potentially in one lump!, this isn't clear) I'd be looking at other options. If the non-availability was a few minutes here and there then it's not so bad.

Fine, you can class a service being unavailable as downtime, but it's not what provider contracts or most review sites class as downtime in my experience, so it doesn't really achieve anything except pointless flames. The unavailability was intermittent but scattered over some days while the fault was isolated progressively. I doubt one of the more expert LUGgers would use managed starter hosting anyway. It's just a baseline. Any of the other providers like to post their uptime and IMAP availability? Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op

Adam Bower wrote:

On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 02:18:43PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:

...

Fine, you can class a service being unavailable as downtime, but it's not what provider contracts or most review sites class as downtime in my experience, so it doesn't really achieve anything except pointless flames.

Sorry, it isn't flaming it's reality. I'd love to be able to get away with telling our customers that downtime is OK because the host was still up.

I feel it's flaming. If it's reality, please post your contract terms that define downtime to include IMAP service being unavailable.

Hearing it wasn't all in one lump is good but I'd be concerned that your service doesn't appear to offer any kind of redundancy.

There are multiple levels of redundancy. If you read earlier messages, you'd know it was a disk in a *Redundant* Array of Independent Disks that was disruptive. The co-op has other servers which could have been switched in, but we decided that it was better to find and fix the fault, then do a properly-planned upgrade. Bottom line: we're completely open about this with our customers, but number of comments on this: zero; proportion of customers hosted on that server renewing: 100%. The only people who seem to care are LUG power users who I doubt would ever be using the co-op's starter hosting instead of running their hosting themselves in some way. Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former lecturer. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire for various work http://www.software.coop/products/

Adam Bower <adam@thebowery.co.uk> wrote:

On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 12:58:23AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:

...

we'd've liked it to be better this year, but hardware failures occur at random. Following the above-mentioned problem, we've decided to

To be honest, many hardware problems manifest themselves (especially disk problems) days or weeks before they take a machine down. Try monitoring your disks more carefully and get better servers with hardware health monitoring and use it.

We have some hardware monitoring (and we're always considering better servers) and we use it. When we see a fault developing, the hardware gets replaced. This wasn't one of them. Even when the dang thing was failing, it wasn't clear which disk was faulty. That's why it was so disruptive.

...

Does anyone have suggestions for other actions that would push that uptime higher while keeping the cost reasonable?

Buy more servers and have some kind of cluster.

Need more clients for the cost of that to stay reasonable. In preparation for that, the next server will have some configuration changes to make moving hosting clients around between servers quicker and easier, to help move them onto a cluster. That's something which is still remarkably without a standard format, as far as I know. Or have I missed a development and there's a standard hosting settings file format now? Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk | .... co IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html | .... op