Not so sure anymore

[mwhym]

First off let me say that I have been a client of HG for a couple of years and that in that time i have come to respect the company in terms of service and stability.

I am a reseller client, and while the packages offered are great in terms of the services and the amounts of space and bandwidth offered, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that (in our case at least) the service is almost unsellable.

We resell hosting to small (and sometimes medium sized) companies, who in my opinion are the most common clientelle of a reseller, but in any case for us they are.

While all the services that can be offered are great, the mail limitations placed on clients by HG's mail policy seem to make it impossible to sell the service anymore. Before jumping on me, let me explain that I am simply talking about the ability to check one's mail here, not sending mass mails, etc.

The basic issue at hand is how many pop checks people can make.
At this time the mail policy is 30 pop checks / hour / IP.

In a scenario that I tried to explain to support if I have a client that has 15 employees, I immediately have problems with this. As almost all companies here share one broadband connection (thus the same IP), and almost all of them work with either outlook or outlook express, I would need to advise them that under no circumstances can any one user check their mail more than once every 30 minutes.

In my 12 year experience with reselling this is simply impossible, and I am truly surprised that tech support has stated to me that this can be done, as if I imposed such a limitation on my business clients I would loose them in no time.

The average office employee nowadays checks their mail at a minimum rate of once per 10 minutes and many check more often. Perhaps I am wrong and people should not check their mail so often, but in my world it just seems unrealistic to impose such strict limits on them.

Now it is clearly understandable that limitations need to be in place in shared environments and we have always been willing to work with them, this one however I don't see how its even possible to work around off, the suggestions HG's support gave me are peculiar (trying not to be offensive here) when they tell me that my clients should check their mail maybe once per hour... or that they can use webmail instead.

I have spoken to some other companies and most have some limitations on this matter, but none of them seem so restrictive, for instance I have gotten :

a limit of simultaneous pop3 connections from the same IP
or
a limit on pop checks per email account

But this limit of 30 pop checks / hour / IP for each domain seems the most excessive one.

I need to weight our options now, as I have said I like hostgator, the support is prompt and the service is a stable one, plus the packages are value for money, but as a reseller I don't know if its even possible to sell them if this restriction is in effect.

Maybe a VPS solution could cover this, but the reseller packages seem too limited with this restriction.

Steve

[GatorDHanna]

Steve,

I understand your concern with the email check limits. We don't actively enforce the 30 checks per hour policy, but will take action if it looks like an excessive amount of checks are occuring and a large number of checks are occuring per minute or something like that.

If you're happy with our hosting, but not the email features, you might want to consider Google Apps for your domain. It's free and would address your needs, including unlimited checks, extremely good spam filtering, and a variety of other helpful features. Google Apps works extremely well with our hosting and our support team can set it up on our end for you very easily. I use Google Apps for my personal email, calendar, etc. and am very happy with it.

Let me know your thoughts.