I’m building a site where users link up with their friends, and
exchange information with them. I’d like for users to be able to
invite their friends to join the site, and for the site to send out an
invitation email.
I found a great deal with Site5 - shared hosting for $5 per month with
5TB of bandwidth. However, my interpretation of their email policy is
that any email not solicited by the recipient is spam, and may lead to
termination of the account.
I’m after advice if this is a common policy among hosting companies,
and whether my plan to send emails as suggested by their friends is
unrealistic. I can see that a user of the site could abuse this
feature to send spam, even if my intentions are honorable. However,
existing sites such as LinkedIn would seem to have the same risk, yet
they do provide this facility.
Rules like this are in place so web hosts can get rid of spammers. If
you are not sending large amounts of emails then you shouldn’t have
anything to worry about. One thing to keep in mind is that is is
standard practice on shared hosting servers to limit the amount of
outgoing emails per hour to 200-300. If you think you are going to be
sending out more emails than that, then you might want to consider a
VPS instead.
The main reason for this is shared hosts usually use a shared IP for the
majority of it’s customers. A spam complaint to hotmail.com, for example
will blacklist that IP, causing everyone trying to send to hotmail.com
to fail. It can take weeks to months to remove a blacklisted IP.
Another problem is server load. Sending bulk email takes time from other
customers sharing your server.
Lastly, Spam doesn’t just mean bulk email. As far as I know, if it does
not have an opt out link, and a double opt in, it is considered by most
companies to be spam.
There is another solution, you could write your app to stagger emails,
so that only so many are sent out per hour.
I suspect larger webhosts will be more “prone” to these policies. I.e.
they won’t care enough when detecting a policy, and may
terminate/suspend your account without prior warning or notice, etc.
Smaller or specialized webhosts, I think, won’t be as ruthless. Usually
they’ll notice you if they suspect anything, not simply pull the plug.
Some webhosts, like hostingrails.com, that I also use, make a limit of
200 e-mails per hour. This is a nice way of compromise between spam vs.
legit. 4800 e-mails per day isn’t gonna make spam companies happy
These webhosts would suggest plugins such as ar_sendmail to send e-mails
in batches to be nice with this limit.
I’d suggest using EngineYard.com if you’re serious, check out their
“what do you get” page for info. Their support is also excellent. Tell
them I refer you and you’ll get significant discount (e-mail me for
details
Good luck Chris!
–
Hendy I.
This forum is not affiliated to the Ruby language, Ruby on Rails framework, nor any Ruby applications discussed here.
