In our first review/discussion based post, I’d like to get into the nitty gritty of a customer concern related to our service offerings. This concern is not unique for our support department, and concentrates on our messages per hour limit for our shared hosting environments.

Over the course of managing our network of shared and reseller servers, we have systematically reduced the amount of messages per hour allowed through our servers per user account. This is currently set at 250 messages per hour per user account.

There are two significant reasons for these limitations:

1) Spam.
By limiting what an account (specifically a malicious account) can generate on a per hour basis, the amount of potential damage in terms of remote RBL blacklisting. This is where malicious accounts impact our innocent user-base. Accounts which slip past our fraud screening, or a reseller’s due diligence are notoriously utilized for high volume email sending in a short period of time.

2) Resource Usage.
If every user on a shared server were to send a large volume of messages at precisely the same time threshold, it would create an overwhelming burden on system resources. By limiting what an account can generate on an hourly basis, we limit the amount of potential resources a single account may use during a one hour window.
Ultimately the limitations are premised on stability and security for our shared environments.

I have been working in this industry going on 7 years now, and managing a shared environment is a difficult task aside from the ongoing threat of internal malicious behaviors.

With every set of rules comes a requirement for review. As our server resources have increased, our ability to meet user demand in our shared environments has increased.As a result, we will be increasing our hourly per user rate limit from 250 => 500 network wide. We feel as though this will benefit our user base, at the same time not be detrimental to system resources or network abuse policies.Users will be able to take advantage of these new rules by end of business Monday, August 26th, 2007.

I wish everyone a good Monday, and a prosperous week.

Regards,
Thomas Brenneke
Network Redux, LLC