RELIABLE domain hosting / mail forwarding service?

Hi,

I have used two outfits in the last few years.

The first one, Clicknames, basically vanished, with nobody answering
emails. I once managed to phone and was told the one person who knew
it all had left.

The second one, which I won't name at the moment, almost never answers
the phone and if there is a problem with email then of course we can't
contact them any other way. They don't have a lot of downtime but when
they have we are stuffed.

Basically, we run a www/smtp/pop machine at the office. It's a
specialised electronics business and the traffic is very light.

I've been using the above outfit as just a billing contact because
that's much cheaper than being with Nominet/NetSol directly, and also
used their control panel for setting up the DNS to point direct to our
in-house machine (which is on a fixed-IP ADSL and runs just fine).

They also do some limited spam filtering, using DNS blacklists, which
helps. We then run Mailwasher on what's left. The plan is to get some
sort of comprehensive anti-spam solution running on the in-house mail
server one day, but my "expert" is very part-time and I don't have
enough understanding of the whole system, with nameservers etc.

After today's extended outage and the total lack of any way to contact
these people (who are just a one man band I think) I am getting really
p155ed off. I can do changes to their control panel to redirect email
to a still-working pop box but it has no effect.

There has to be a better way.

One could get a "business" ISP to do it all but that would be very
expensive, for about 10 domain names, and if that ISP goes we are
stuffed again. I wouldn't go to anybody but a big name; nowadays any
one man band with a PC and a 2M leased line can be an "ISP"

We have the server in-house for a specific future purpose, to do with
security and running special applications which an ISP wouldn't allow
you to run.

Can anyone suggest anything, before I tear all my hair out?


Peter.
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In article <(E-Mail Removed)>, (E-Mail Removed)
(Peter) wrote:

> Can anyone suggest anything, before I tear all my hair out?

Talk to another peter.

www.gradwell.com

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Paul Cummins - Always a NetHead
Wasting Bandwidth since 1981

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:22:27 +0000, (E-Mail Removed) (Peter) wrote:

>Can anyone suggest anything, before I tear all my hair out?

www.gradwell.com specialise in this area and are very reliable
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Andy Norman (E-Mail Removed)
http://www.norman.cx/
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"Peter" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...

[SNIP]

> Can anyone suggest anything, before I tear all my hair out?

I've been using and recommending http://www.alivewww.com/ for a number of
years now. Very happy with the service.