RE: who offers cheap (personal) 1U colo?

[jlewis () lewis org]

On Sat, 13 Mar 2004, Michel Py wrote:

> <me puts the devil's advocate suit on>
> $50 is a lot of money; I currently send email from my aDSL address
> because a) my ISP's smarthost sucks  b) historically their SMTP hosts
> have been blacklisted more than mine c) even if they did not suck (which
> has improved a lot recently, actually) they still won't accept large
> attachments or mailing-list traffic.
> I pay $36/mo for my aDSL. $50 _more_ sounds a lot.
> </me puts the devil's advocate suit on>

I checked with our hosting dept. and we won't sell 1U traffic policed colo
quite that cheap.  Close to it, but not $50/month.  And I agree, for most
people spending an extra $50/month just to be able to send email (though I
imagine they'd also do some personal web hosting and maybe other things as
long as the machine was there), not to mention the expense of buying a 1U
server and having to maintain it remotely isn't going to fly.  You'd have
to be a pretty hard core netgeek and have the disposible income ($600/year
+ the server...I can think of lots of better ways to spend that) to
consider that a good solution...at which point why not just pay a bit
extra to your ISP (or another ISP) and get a static IP with reverse DNS,
which I would think would get you excluded from most reasonable DNSBLs.

For most people it'd probably make much more sense to find a provider that
offers some form of SMTP relay service.  It'd probably be cheaper/month,
and they wouldn't have the trouble and expense of providing/maintaining
a colo server.

> Besides, although this list is definitely the right place to find people
> that would operate a personal SMTP relay in a colo just by the virtue
> that it's the geeky thing to do, what does it change in the big scheme

I'd imagine you could even find a few friends and share the cost/utility
of the server such that it only cost each person a few dollars/month...but
then someone's got to pay the bills, collect money, harass the people who
don't pay their share, etc.

> of things? All these small business customers (20 persons) that I have
> that use a sub-$100 "business" DSL and M$ Small Business Server +
> Exchange are not going to go for it, because the cost then will suddenly
> become $50 plus the 1U server plus my time plus maintaining it.

What if the cost were only $10/month and they didn't have to maintain
anything other than a set of usernames/passwds (SMTP Auth) or perhaps a
list of their own IPs (relaying based on IP)?

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 Jon Lewis *jlewis () lewis org*|  I route
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