Whil Hentzen (Pro*) wrote:
My preference is to leave it to the professionals. While I host my own
sites for the education, convenience and humbling learning
experiences,
Most of the professionals only offer pop3, which mean the mail is
downloaded to the client's computer. How many of your client's
computers have redundancy built in or are backed up daily?
Its not a difficult job to back up a mail server running imap. In this
way you are doing a backup of everyones mail at once. Just start up
Nautilus, and create a directory called Mail_backup. Each day, using
Nautilus , create a subdirectory off Mail_backup with a name of the
current date like "2006-07-06". Then, using Nautilus, browse to
/var/spool/imap and click on copy folder. Then, using Nautilus , browse
to /Mail_backup/2006-07-06 and click on paste. That's it, all done.
For even greater convenience create a crontab job to run daily to
perform this little task. For greater security create the backup to a
nfs mounted partition on another computer within the network, so the
backup is on a separate computer from the original computer.
Bragging rights, too. "Yeah, I've got a half dozen servers, redundant
T1s from two providers, all in my basement..." is today's equivalent
of the local tough in levis with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the
sleeve of his white t-shirt, talking about the 410 horses with <fill
in all sorts of gearhead car talk here> under the hood of his 57 chevy.
:)
I don't generate my own electricity or purify my own
water; I leave that to professionals who understand how to engineer
facilities that deliver 99.9999% of the time.
Name one. :)
My T1 has been on 100% of the time since I got it four or five years
ago. The local power company, on the other hand, blips on us every 3
to 6 months with nary an excuse or logical reason.
I'd suggest you weigh
the benefits and risks of web and (especially) mail hosting and
determine how robust an engineering plant and guarantee you want to
provide. There are sites that provide hosted mail service and will
even let you private brand it (with a reasonable markup, of course)
and that would be my preference.
The trick is to find that place who really can deliver five 9s. I've
used two different hosting companies, big names, folks you would think
have figured it all out, and I've had entire days of being down. I'm a
little nervous of trying out yet another company....
Whil
[excessive quoting removed by server]
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