Thank you very much for your explanation. Sorry for my lack of info about the different types of emails. You were correct in assuming that they are usually just a typical 20-30k message and being sent out over the course of an entire work day by our company and our clients. Since I wrote my previous message we actually already purchased a VPS plan with you guys and have moved about 30 of our sites onto the server. So far everything is working great and your staff has been exceptional. We went with the middle option in terms of VPS package ($74/month) and the email has been great so far. This was the main reason we switched from our old host as we were constantly struggling with sending and receiving messages.

My only other question is, is there anyway to view the actual load or usage of the mail server? Specifically is there anyway to monitor our clients to see how many messages each domain name is sending out per day? I have seen software available for purchase that will do this but I just wanted to first see if I could either purchase something like this from you guys, or if there was an easier solution such as anyway to simply download this data from the server because we don’t really need something to monitor in real time the usage, it would just be nice to know the actual amount of messages each client is sending.

Thanks for all your help, and we are very satisfied with our server so far!

Without knowing the specific details of your situation it is a little hard to tell. If the email is fairly standard (20-30K maybe, some images, only a few with large files attached) and is sent out over the course of the day, the base VPS solution should handle that kind of email volume just fine. On the other hand, for example, if you have a script that generates 1000s of emails within minutes, the server will need to be bigger to handle that quickly. Large files and rate of sending really affect performance on VPS (as well as dedicated and shared hosting platforms).

A VPS is your computer and so if you are using the resources for other things, like the web server or the mysql server, you will want to think about how those services can affect your mail server. If you are hosting a lot of sites (you said small ones, but thousands of outgoing emails per day is quite a bit), the web server will need considerable resources.

Give us a ring, we have reps specifically trained on vps hosting. We will work through the specifics with you but do keep in mind the flexibility of a VPS is hard to beat. Upgrading can be done in a day (sometimes within minutes) and does NOT involve moving any of your sites.

Have a great day!

Todd Robinson
President
InMotion Hosting, Inc.

thanks
sam