Should We Move to a Dedicated Server?

[DryFire]

We are currently on a shared hosting plan and don’t really need to upgrade to a dedicated server due to storage or bandwidth limitations. However, we sell downloadable products and from time to time we find that our emails with the download links end up getting blocked (especially by AOL). We have added the download links to the “Thank You for Shopping Here” page, which helps, but we do have some customers who for whatever reason don’t click on the download link on the “Thank You” page and then also have the email with the download link blocked by their ISP. When that happens, we don’t hear about it until they contact us asking where their download link is. (Did I mention that I hate AOL?)

Anyway, I think the reason that our emails are sometimes blocked is because one of the other websites that shares our server must have thought it would be a good idea to spam thousands of email addresses and ended up blacklisting the server for everyone else. Because email sent from our shared server can have poor delivery rates, we currently use constant contact to send out our newsletter. We are currently paying them $75 per month for their service, which is about the same as what a dedicated server would cost us. So my question is... do you think we should we move to a dedicated server and drop constant contact? We like some of Constant Contact’s email campaign tracking features, and their high delivery rates, but we would just as soon put the money into dedicated hosting, if we were able to use some sort of email script to get the same tracking features, and delivery rates from our own server. That added speed for the site would also be a nice bonus, but it wouldn’t be the real reason for moving to a dedicated server if we choose to. Has anyone here already faced this dilemma? If so, what are your thoughts?

[shri]

Depending on how competant your current host is, you might have a management nightmare moving to and administering your own server.

Unmanaged servers are cheap -- but you have to manage / patch and secure them yourself.

[DryFire]

Yup I don't want to deal with that. We're currently with Ipowerweb... not sure how much management would be required if we went with them for a dedicated server. The main thing is that I would like to be able to send out email to our customers without spam filters and blacklists causing problems. Hosted email is nice because they take care of the whitelisting etc., but if having a dedicated server would give us similar delivery results without a lot of work applying of ISP whitelists… it might be worth considering.

[Phil_C]

We've had a dedicated server for many years and personally I prefer to always outsource the SMTP side to avoid the very issues you have mentioned. $75 sounds like good value if they also provide tracking info, perhaps you could use this information to develop your email campaigns and so provide more conversions and therefore pay for the additional cost incurred with a dedicated server. Google prefers sites on dedicated servers as well...

[onlineleben]

Check if it is possible to just get a dedicated IP for your domain.
Could help in getting you out of the bad neighbourhood.

[DryFire]

Great suggestions... I'll look into it further.

[LifeinAsia]

Also be aware that if they've had people spamming from their IPs, they may have managed to get their entire block of IPs blacklisted. If that's the case, getting a dedicated IP in the same block won't fix your pe-mail problem.

[shri]

Besides, a dedicated IP is only for the website. Your email is delivered via the main IP address of the server, which is shared by everyone else.

If your account is cpanel based, might be pretty easy to just move to another server or host.