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Looking for a VPS for high volume transactional email
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Looking for a VPS for high volume transactional email

One of the sites I've been running for 6 years sends out over 130,000 transactional emails a day (mostly emails notifying members about new activity on the site). I'm looking for a VPS provider who can tolerate receiving the occasional* automated email abuse report from email providers without requiring manual intervention**.

I'm not looking to send all 130,000+ emails from one VPS so any VPS that is within 1,000 miles of NYC (eg. Atlanta, Chicago, Toronto), has at least 500GB of monthly bandwidth and has a dedicated IPv4 address would probably work well.

The site is a free site that people use to promote sustainable practices in their local communities. If you need more details on the site, please send me a private message and I'll be happy to send you a link to the site and provide you the IP addresses of the current mail servers (which all scored 99/100 on ReturnPath's SenderScore.org email sender reputation site the last time I checked).

*By occasional I mean 1 out of 4 million emails or less cause an abuse report. Below are details on how many abuse reports were sent in recent history:

  • 1 in January
  • 5 in December (one person marking 5 different emails at once)
  • 0 in November
  • 0 in October
  • 1 in September
  • and then 0 until April

**I'm already part of the feedback reporting programs for the biggest email providers (AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, ..) and my site automatically receives the ARF reports directly and stops emailing the people who caused the abuse report. So having to manually reply to a ticket and explain why every reported email is not spam can be tiresome since I'm the only person running the site.

Comments

  • @nexmark you see the volume that was listed? That's a $600/month Mandrill bill.

  • I highly recommend looking into a low end dedicated server for running a mail server.

  • @mikeyur said:
    nexmark you see the volume that was listed? That's a $600/month Mandrill bill.

    Ah, @scyclops good luck.

  • said: sends out over 130,000 transactional emails a day

    I am wondering how many members you've got to have on the site for this one. I think for size like this sendgrid has some business solutions that might suite your needs.

  • Sadly, email services like Sendgrid, Mandrill and Amazon SES are all too costly for the amount of emails I send and the budget I have since my site is free to use.

  • Sounds like you need to find a new budget for sending that many emails that are 'legit'.

  • @scyclops said:
    Sadly, email services like Sendgrid, Mandrill and Amazon SES are all too costly for the amount of emails I send and the budget I have since my site is free to use.

    But I am sure you do get decent advertising revenue.

    Consider it as part of your business cost, just like you spent the money running (multiple) servers, spend time to secure them and set things up, etc.

    Of course if you are looking for a totally free solution, then set up webmin (or even better, diy from command line)

  • Try propagandabox.com ;-)

  • @scyclops have the solution for you but ... minimum 600 $/month (minimal billing cycle 3 month) or 950 $/month month to month payment

  • Amazon SES seems like it'll be your best bet.

    Should be ~$400 for your current volume with the ability to scale it up and down as needed.

    Maybe look into getting a sponsor for the emails if you cant afford that, one or two lines of text with a link clearly saying its sponsored would probably sell well if you have good open numbers for those emails (You'd have to check amazon T+C's)

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