[ale] Speakeasy ADSL for web/email server?

[James Taylor]

I  used speakeasy for three years and only had two short planned outages
in the first year as a result of a POP move.
No other outages I was aware of afterward.

I'd recommend Novell NetMail for provisionaing an iSP class mail system.

It's not free ($15/mailbox list, normally at least a 20% less through a
retailer), but it has a slick web admin interface and good user self
administration for webemail (two different user configurable interfaces)
and pop3 and imap4 access available.
 
You can download a free 60-day trial at
http://www.novell.com/products/netmail/

disclaimer - I work for a Novell partner, but I've been runing it on
SuSE linux for a couple of years and It's worked quite well for me.

-jt

James Taylor
The East Cobb Group, Inc.
james.taylor at eastcobbgroup.com
678-697-9420

>>> kafka at antichri.st 12/31/04 6:05 PM >>>
Hi all,

I was wondering whether anyone might be able to give me a little advice 
on this:  I'm currently paying around $100/mo for a server at 1&1 (and 
I'm actually quite happy with them), plus an extra $60-odd/mo for my 
cable connection.  What I'm wondering is whether it might be advisable 
for me to switch to someone like Speakeasy with their 6.0/768 adsl 
package. 

This would give me better control over the server, including hands-on 
access to it (which is always nice) as well as greater flexibility (more

ips, more options in terms of what I might like to run, etc.); however, 
I'm a little concerned about two things: 

First, and most important-- reliability.  What's Speakeasy's uptime 
like?  Am I likely to find myself losing service on a routine basis?  I 
don't absolutely need 5-9s kinds of levels of reliability (I mainly 
provide service for myself, some friends, and a handful of low-paying 
customers who, well, can deal with a little downtime every so often); 
still, I wouldn't want to be in a situation where the connection would 
flake out on a weekly, or even a monthly, basis.  So, for those of you 
who do use Speakeasy (or others; I'd be open to suggestions), can you 
give me some idea as to whether the reliability is there?

Second, I do provide my users with access to their own email accounts 
etc. through Plesk.  I'm not overjoyed with Plesk from a security and 
administration standpoint, but on the other hand it does make things 
somewhat idiot-proof for my less technical users.  Now, I suppose I 
*could* buy plesk, since it's not all that expensive, but I just 
wondered whether there were any suitably polished alternatives to it.  
(I know about webmin, but it never seemed quite polished enough to offer

to non-techy customers)...

Thanks for any advice!
--George
--------------------------------------
George Carless ... kafka at antichri.st
Words are just dust in deserts of sound
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