The extreme costs of cheap email and web hosting

DeSpaminator, Spam Filtering, Spam Sources

The time and costs for both companies and individual users filter through spam and virus is enormous.

Small and large businesses are always looking for the most cost effective way to maintain web presence. Just like real estate location is important and to business visibility is vital. With all of the “Do It Yourself” options for putting up a website of course the next question is how much per month? At that point the non-technical are simply going to go with the cheapest as long as it gets the job done.

With the amount of outsourced IT for web presence there are many areas of hosting services that are mystifying to actual owners of businesses. And they do not have time to learn a whole new set of buzz terms and acronyms to get up to speed – they hire folks to do that. They shop for cost savings there as well. What amazes me is the cost of the cost savings. A little bit here and a little bit there adds up over time and even though there are perceived cost savings this big ugly machine is running behind the scenes. And the machine is mighty!

When we (CompanyV) block an email from a spam provider we actually send a response back – most blacklisting services do not.

What this means o our customers is that the people attempting to communicate with them, who may be on a bad provider, are made aware that the mail the was not delivered.

Many times we will investigate and set an allow for the sender. Sometimes the IP address they are sending from as been sold to a different company and its reputation has been cleared or can be cleared.

How does an IP address make it to a CompanyV blacklist?

  1. We monitor the incoming mail servers and have accounts that a spam traps that we monitor for unsolicited mail.
  2. We run a Bayes database and learning systems to scan for spam patterns.
  3. We run Virus scanners on all incoming mail and investigate senders of virus mail.
  4. Our Customers can report spam and we investigate senders and block per requests.
  5. We subscribe to public databases of reported spammers.
  6. We monitor and track bad hosts that do not respond to abuse reports and that continually host spammers.

Who are bad hosts?

There are a few service providers that are major players in hosting spam and virus senders.

We are unwilling to set allows for mail coming from senders because they have policies and practices that threaten the safety of our customers.

A recent flood of spam has been coming from companies selling services that allow relays from other countries that have already been blacklisted.

Many of these companies sell reseller agreements to unsuspecting web services and small hosting and web designers.

The Endurance International Group has been buying small and large hosts who have provided inexpensive hosting to a large audience.
Bluehost and Hostgator for example were highly regarded provider for WordPress hosting but when these companies were absorbed by Endurance InternationalGroup service response time became problematic and mail services are now distributed over many many many servers and responses to abuse requests are rarely responded to. This creates massive problems for people whose services are with these hosts. see: BBB Customer Reviews and

An important note – MOST service providers will not even indicate that mail has bounced if they detect it is coming from a blacklisted server.

Endurance International Group, Inc. (EIG), formerly BizLand, is one of the world’s largest website hosting companies. The company was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, managing over 2.9 million customers and 10 million domains. It achieved its size by acquiring a large number of smaller hosts, which it continues to operate under the original names. In 2011, Endurance was bought from Accel-KKR by Warburg Pincus and GS Capital Partners, for around $975 million.

Warburg Pincus, LLC is an American global private equity firm with offices in the United States, Europe, Brazil, China and India.

In addition to the services problems presented about EIG there are other players that we consider to be bad hosts.
Among some of the worst are services supplied by:

We are unwilling to set allows for servers that manged by service providers that will not take action on abusive behavior.

If you are trying to send email to one of our customers you can send us the bounce message and we will review and respond!

We do realize how important the ease of communication is to both our customers and the customers of our customers.

If we are blocking email coming into our services we will investigate and set an allow as long as it does not put our customers at risk.

Click here and use this form to report delivery problems!