Hosting for School District

JCristea · #1 11-02-2005, 12:01 AM

I was dismayed to find that my local school district was using any and all forms of email address from hotmail to gmail. The superintendent even had a hotmail address.

The response I received from their IT department was that it would cost them "$2,500.00 for an E-mail software at about $11,000.00 the cost of manning the server".

I found it ridiculous that they would even expect to need their own server. I do reselling and was wondering if anyone else sees any drawbacks from hosting their site? Please let me know your thoughts.

The district might have a need for 500+ email accounts. Is there any way a list can be imported to create these accounts? Or do they have to be entered manually one at a time?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Jim
jcristea@yahoo.com

MachineDog · #2 11-02-2005, 09:37 AM

They'd need to be put in one at a time, unless you rented out a dedi and had access to the root email program. Inwhich you could probablly import them in some kind of XML form. Probablly uses a MySQL DB to manage the email accounts. And yea, the prices they have there are REDICULOUS. You can get a good server to handle all those accounts for around $150/m.

Although if you're looking for pricing there's one thing you gotta remember: You get what you pay for.

JCristea · #3 11-02-2005, 10:25 AM

Thanks for the information. What would you think of my offering them to host their website plus email via HostGator? It would be 500-800 email accounts. Since importing wouldn't be an option, I'd have to do in manually. It would take some time but I think I have the means to do it.

I currently have an Aluminum reseller plan but expect it would have to be larger for them. How much larger for that email capacity? Is this idea feasible for me to do?

Thanks for any help you can offer.
Jim

MachineDog · #4 11-02-2005, 01:22 PM

Well if everyone has an email account of around 50 MB capacity... well you might just need a dedicated server. :S

TeeJa · #5 11-02-2005, 02:23 PM

I'll second that for using a dedicated. That many Email accounts would suck resellers box to a crawl if even half try to send/receive mail at the same time? Then you would be shut off for server load..

gone2alpine · #6 11-02-2005, 02:42 PM

I'll third that.

The amount of spam alone generated by school supply vendors is incredible. Our district server only has about 75 mail accounts and the traffic it generates can get to be insane.

Does the school have a high speed connection with an available static IP?

An old iMac could run MacOS Server 10.3 which will handle mail and web services easily. Setup and management of that machine should be WAY less than 11K. The setup (you could import the email addresses) could be done in less than a day. The web page design and creation is a whole different thing. It needs to be done without regard for where you host.

Once that set up is done, the server really doesnt require much management. OSX has no known viruses or that sort of thing to casue issues. So management really gets down to adding new users, deleting users, etc. It can be done remotely so it's easy to farm out as a contract.

There's my 2 cents.