Sending mails with attachments

mails, attachment, hosting plan

[kkonline]

Currently I am on a shared hosting service. My main concerns are to send a newsletter every fortnight which has an attachment of about 3 MB and has to be delivered to 800+ members.

In doing so on a shared hosting plan i receive a memory allocation error as the php.ini has 32 MB and i cannot change it because i am on shared hosting. I am using Joomla and Acajoon component to send the mails; after every 7-8 mails out of 800 members i recive the fatal error of memory allocation and I am looking for a solution to this problem.

My main concerns are of sending 3 MB attachment mails to the members . What kind of hosting should i go for in order to send mails successfully.

Would VPS be useful .
Also what exactly is DNS hosting?

[rocknbil]

First let me say, if your email attachments are 3MB, something is wrong. There is no reason to cram that much data to your recipients' email. Doesn't matter what it is - .jpgs, pdf's, whatever, there should be some way of getting that under a megabyte, even zipping it if you have to.

Yes, a VPS should work for you. It gives you adequate controls over the domain configuration, but no command line/root access. You MAY have the same problem for this reason (can't edit php.ini), check with the potential host.

DNS hosting, if I get you right, is a service to host your DNS servers off-site. The RFC for DNS hosting demands you have at least two DNS servers, and those MUST be on different IP addresses. It recommends that they be in physically dispersed locations, that is, not in the same IP class.

Some VPS/dedicated plans allow your server to serve as it's "own" DNS. This is where these problems crop up: the documentation says it's perfectly fine to create two DNS servers on the same IP. It's not. You'd want 1) either a second ip address for the purpose of a secondary DNS server on your dedi/VPS, or 2) an external DNS service to host your secondary DNS server (preferred.)

[janharders]

>Yes, a VPS should work for you. It gives you adequate controls over the domain configuration, but no command line/root access.

why should a vps (if I understand it correctly as virtual private server) not be accessible via ssh, most likely with root access if needed? that's, at least in germany, common practice.
a vps therefore would work since you could easily write (or hire someone to write) a commandline script that works through your mails and sends them one by one.

[rocknbil]

Most VPS's I have encountered don't give you SSH/root access. You might find one that does, but I would be a bit concerned about that.

[janharders]

You're absolutely right, it's not the best way to go if one's not experienced in system administration. But I really didn't run into vps without root access, yet. I mean, I always figured, that's what you want in a vps, being able to install you own apps, configure your applications the way you want etc pp. After all, without that possibility, it's just shared hosting at a higher price ;)