Many thanks for the various helpful suggestions I've received.
murr rhame <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>I doubt that you will find many service providers who are perfect.
>100% uptime is extremely rare. 100% delivery doesn't happen on the
>Internet. .../.... Most often, the delivery problems are at the receiving
>end.
Agreed. But one of the advantages of a list is that you can use it to
compare notes with other members, and thereby determine, in a good number
of cases, whether a given problem was the fault of the provider or whether
it occurred somewhere down the line.
One of the problems with a free service is that it's rather difficult to
see what right you have to complain when it doesn't come up to scratch.
Lyris sends us warnings whenever their server goes down for maintenance, or
they suffer an outage. In some cases, they report problems that we wouldn't
even have noticed if they hadn't told us about them.
Miles Fidelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes, regarding free services:
>
>D. You're stuck with their domain, which locks you in to their service
>forever (with your own domain, you can change service providers whenever
>you want), and worse,
>
That's a key point, and one I forgot to mention in my original post. Not
only does your own domain give you the flexibility to move, but I feel that
it also projects a more professional image.
>
>By the way, $500/month sounds awfully high - most ISPs charge around
>$30/month for a list. ../...
The $500 a month figure is an extrapolation on the basis of Jliste's
current growth. We got a bit of a shock when the Lyris bill for March came
in: traffic had more than doubled, and because of their flat fee system,
the bill had gone up in proportion. Given our potential for growth, I can
see us hitting that $500 figure quite soon if we stay with the same system.
For comparison, I've so far looked mainly at two other services: SparkList
<http://www.sparklist.com/>, and a Web service provider I know which is on
the point of launching its own list hosting service.
Two things puzzle me:
1: Although both Web and list hosting services are billed on the basis of
bandwidth occupation (either as per volume, or as per number of messages)
the rates being charged by these commercial services seem much higher for
lists than for Web services.
One of the companies I'm looking at throws in up to 50Mb of list traffic
per month with the basic Web hosting deal, then charges $US 13 for every
50Mb extra of list traffic. On the basis of an average message size of
3.4Kb, those 50Mb would come out to just over $17 on Lyris's rate plan.
Compare this with the average Web hosting service. A lot of providers these
days will allow you 5Gb of monthly data transfer - ie 100 x 50 Mb - in a
basic $50 package. If I've not screwed up the calculations, that's about 4%
of the first figure I quoted, and about 3% of the second. Why such a big
difference?
2: I also note that providers such as Lyris offer few discounts for volume.
Lyris's offer, in particularly, is desperately linear. Your traffic
quadruples: the bill does too. As far as I can see, you need to be ready to
hire a virtual server - at $1000 a month - before you begin to see any
reductions in per-volume costs.
Of the three offers I've looked at closely so far, only Sparklist has a
reasonably degressive rate structure.
I also find it strange that there are other services which charge a flat
monthly fee (in the case of Esosoft <http://www.esosoft.com/mailinglist/>
as low as $5 a month), but with no volume-related charges at all. I wonder
what the economics of those services are?
My hunch is that the field of mailing list hosting has not yet seen the
kind of competitive shakedown that has taken place in the Web hosting
sector.
In the latter you're much more likely to find similar for-payment packages
pretty well everywhere, alongside free services such as Geocities, which
thrust ads at you with almost every click.
--
David Sharp, journaliste, France <http://www.vavi.com/>
Tel (home) 331 42 64 35 94 - (office) 331 40 41 47 92
E-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ICQ: 16881741
