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Please suggest best Email Solution with Failover
Hi,
One of my client looking for email service with 100% uptime. So I was planning to go for some sort of fail over system which can take up all mail functionality including sending / receiving emails.
On my research, I found that smarter mail enterprise have such an option
http://help.smartertools.com/SmarterMail/v10/Topics/Installation/Failover.aspx
But this I think is not possible on 2 vps , but require dedicated servers.
Have any one tried it?
Or is there any thing on linux platform which can accomplish the same? like mail in a box on a fail over setup?
Other option is not to take headache and suggest some any of the following
1) Rackspace Email Hosting
2) Google Apps
Can you please share your thoughts?
Comments
Rackspace Email Hosting. It's cost-effective, easy, and fantastic.
How many mailboxes? If you just need 1-3 order it through a reseller (such as me) because if you go direct, you must have at least 5 mailboxes.
Ho i didn't know they have resellers. At present they have around 30 boxes.. as a reseller can you provide better pricing?
Hosting your own email (especially for others) will result in a lot of frustration, maybe not initially, but somewhere along the road, there's bound to be headache...
I suggest:
https://runbox.com
You can suggest your client to go with Office 365 and, depending how much they would like to invest in it, also get the licenses for Office products (Word, Excel, etc). I believe there are some nice bundles (or you can search for a good reseller, which offers this)
Well, somewhere along the road there's headaches with most things. The question is, are you being paid enough to deal with them?
Hosting email yourself can be done, and done well. But I'd be very wary of a client that demanded 100% uptime. For most self-hosted solutions it ain't gonna happen.
I host email, and my clients are happy with the service I provide. But if a new client came to me with this 100% uptime requirement I'd have to say, "sorry, can't do it".
Do SLA just partial refund for downtime
Nah, that's not the way I think... the client want's 100% uptime, not 99% uptime and a few bucks back at the end of the month.
Yeah, honestly this is where the budget snowballs. I mean it sounds easy in theory if you haven't run a mail server for a while, to just up and do a failover. Because web failover is so extremely easy, it doesn't sound right to most people that mail is an entirely different beast. It is though, and it can present so many unforeseen complications if your stack is not just right and very well tested under various conditions.
I think high availability would be best separating out services and having each one of them failover, but you need low latency so you're still going to end up in the same datacenter (or extremely near to each other) and subject to many of the same potential single points of failure.
You basically need someone else's system to pull it off without some incredible work, and that's either by paying for a spot on someone else's server or buying expensive licensing.
For example, one seemingly cheap solution is to have two mail servers running failover at the DNS level and running a frequent rsync to sync over changes to account data and e-mail folders. But then you have to sync both ways when the first server fails and the second receives new e-mail and this could result in e-mails being shifted around at random, and clients will then complain about that. It wouldn't be seamless. It's things like that most people don't really think about until it's too late, and they've spent all this time working on a stack that still generates customer complaints.
Hi Jar, does MXroute have this feature? 100% uptime and failover?
Afraid not. I mean, 100% uptime is always my goal and something I strive for in all things, but not a specific feature yet. It's the subject I spend nights awake thinking about, and every time I think I have something on the drawing board I find a gaping hole in the plan.
You could find a grandfathered Google apps domain and have it all setup for a one time fee of <$50 + $10/year for the domain renewal. It all depends on what kind of needs you have though.
@shovenose how is rackspaces reselling pricing?
@Riz no they are not interested in Google apps free version using some used domain
Did any one used http://www.viux.com before? how is this company?
Self hosted a solution? If you're looking for true 100% I'd set up exchange failover cluster. Not the cheapest - but you pay for a solid fail over system.
@praveen - In the past, the only way that I was able to get close to this as a service for a large client was to have mx1 and mx2 outside mail servers/spam scanners relaying inbound mail to a local mail server at the customer location, with an rsync'ed local backup machine ready to replace the primary local server if it blew up. If the customer's Internet service when down they still had their mailboxes available, it apeared to them that outgoing mail was sent, but they not send or receive mail. As @Jar said 100% mail service uptime is not an easy, or cheap thing to do. It is also seldom really required.
you use your OWN domain with Gapps. the paid for version especially, but also possible with the free version
office365 - do they say 100% uptime?
there's a big difference between offering 99.9%, 99.999%, and 100% uptime. the different is money. must be very mission critical if 5nines isn't good enough
Well then the paid version using their domain.
As @Jar pointed out, what you're asking for isn't cheap. Seems like it costs about $50/user/year.
On the comment of @FrankZ, MXGuarddog is nice and really affordable -- I just finished setting up a company with them for email filtering. The LDAP integration makes things really easy if you have an AD setup. They will be your primary mail servers. From there, you can forward all of your mail to a local server on site. If your server goes down they will attempt to redeliver. At this point a VM cluster will come in handy for redundancy.
Office365 is pretty good, but I doubt even Microsoft guarantee 100% uptime and even if they did all it would actually entail is getting some of your money back if it did go down.
100% uptime is practically impossible to achieve, even with HA and multiple backup systems it's still possible for something to fall over and at some point there is going to be a requirement to perform some maintenance.
The first question I'd be asking is does your client really need 100% uptime or is 99.9x% and being with a provider that's large enough to have a team on it within minutes if something does go wrong actually sufficient.
There are a few LDAP based solutions that can handle HA email, and they are about the least hassle of the various options outside of exchange; Kolab can do it as well I believe and that is free. But really don't go down this route unless you have a lot of experience in this area, as while its still easier than any alternative its still very complex.
Just get them to use a provider who specialises in HA email hosting, there are a few who have good reputations as hosting your own email is really a mugs game as its a lot of hassles for little benefit. As many have mentioned advise them to go with Rackspace or Gmail, both have good reputations. Note Office365 had a serious down time (12+ hours) a few months ago, so I personally would steer clear of them at the moment.
I vouch for Rackspace Email Hosting, been using them for SavvyReady for about a year. No problems so far. I've also used them to provide reliable email services for clients of mine, they haven't had a single issue.
It's cheap, though, only $2 per mailbox, per month.
I found out www.servermx.com that for me got the best value for the money
They are reliable, gives customized solutions at low cost and, moreover, also gives support via telephone (and, despite my bad horrible English, they understood my needs).My customers are happy even if they own little companies (the biggest is made of 20 employes ) but they still find agreable the mix of vps + web management + email that i'm providing them.
nice self advertising