Not happy with HostGator at the moment. I've spent the last 4 months getting ready to switch over from an 11 year old server which I owned to a VPS plan with HG. Dec 21st, I made the switch, updating from vB to XF2 in the process. Everything seemed to go well.
Bear with me, this might be a bit long...
Part of the reason for switching was also email related. I am NOT a server admin or IT person at all. I am a mechanical engineer by day and flailing admin by night. My site has been up for 15 years though and during that time, I had various forum members that helped me out. Unfortunately, I did not realize there were issues with my email setup for emails going out from the forum. The guy that set it up had moved away and I had no real reason to think something was amiss.
Over the years, I would occasionally send out a mass mail to my users. Each time, I might get back 30-50 bounces due to bad email addresses. If the user had not been active on the site in a few years, I might nuke their account. More often though, I just put them in a "Deadmail" usergroup. This group couldn't do much of anything other than log in and contact the admins. This worked well to get people to update old email addresses. My last mass mail was about six years ago.
Two weeks before my recent move to HostGator, I sent out a mass email to all my users to let them know the site would be going down and why. Of 21.5K emails sent out, I got back about 1500 emails, higher than normal, which was my first indication that there might be an issue. I noticed a LOT of the accounts were users that had registered and been approved, but their last activity date was exactly the same as their registration date. This got me to thinking there were issues with them not getting the emails letting them know their accounts were approved. In the process of getting ready for the move, I was asking some IT related users on my site about this and they started asking all kinds of questions to which I did not have answers. The long and short of it was that my server's outbound email was not setup with valid (or any) DKIM/DMARC DNS entries. I use G Suite for all my regular email.
So, we worked out what all the correct entries needed to be after the changeover to the new VPS and upgrade to XF. After the changeover, members were still sporadically getting emails, some not at all. We did some more work using dmarcian.com, mxtoolbox.com, etc,... When I thought I finally had everything fixed, I sent out a mass mail to my users to let them know about the changeover and prompting them to come see the new site.
It all went downhill from there.
Right off the bat, I knew something was wrong. I started getting a LOT of undeliverable replies. In fact, it climbed to over 10K and now sits at almost 18K!! I've been uploading dmarc reports from email providers non-stop. Then around noon on Dec 31, I get an email from HostGator warning about a spam complaint. It was from ONE user account, one that had not been active at all since the day it was created in 2006... They also linked me to the CAN-SPAM act. I immediately sent a reply explaining what I was doing, how I was trying to contact my users, how I was trying to get the email into compliance with the DKIM/DMARC requirements, etc,...
I got no reply.
I woke up New Years day to find that my site had been suspended. The email they sent me mentioned NOTHING about email issues. Rather, it stated that they had detected malware on my site. Their tech support was useless. They just kept telling me that I had to get rid of the malware and then they could lift the suspension. Having zero experience with this stuff, I tried using clamAV in cPanel to no avail. I buckled and signed up for a year of SiteLock scanning/cleaning. HG's support people assured me that once I got a clean bill of health from SiteLock, I would be good to go. So, many hours and hundreds of dollars later, I did indeed get a clean bill of health. In fact, they could find NO problems at all to begin with. When I got back with HG tech support, they said they could not lift the suspension because the "infected content" still existed. The email they sent me showed,
/home/twtexco/public_html/forums
as the infected content. Tech support said that until I removed the entire directory structure, they could not help me!!??
I went back to the email sent to let me know the site was suspended and replied to it, letting them know the results of the SiteLock investigation. They took about six hours to respond and finally informed me that there was in fact NO malware, but that they had received more spam complaints and thus decided to shut me down. After reviewing the emails, they decided I was legit and finally lifted the suspension, over 16 hours after imposing it.
They never gave me a chance to shut down email and never acknowledged my initial response to their original warning about spam.
Now they are also informing me about their requirement for double opt-in for users to receive ANY emails from a forum!? According to them, creating an account, agreeing to the TOS, and responding to the confirmation email doesn't count. I have 21+K users from over 15 years of running my site. How in the world could they claim anything about what those users did or did not do with respect to opting in or out of anything!? I've had like 5 new users since I made the change over.
Here is their policy on the double opt in
Small business web hosting offering additional business services such as: domain name registrations, email accounts, web services, online community resources and various small business solutions.
www.hostgator.com
I am miffed about how they handled this. Prior to purchasing their VPS plan, I explicitly told them I was going to use it to run a forum and that there would be a lot of outbound emails. They never mentioned anything about their double opt in policy. They just kept telling me it would be perfect for my needs...
Is anyone else dealing with a double opt in policy imposed by a service provider?
If I try to move away from HG, I could lose a crap load of money because they claim they do not do refunds or prorate anything after the first 45 days. Of course, I don't want to run into similar issues with another hosting service.
How do you guys handle emails? Are you sending them via sendmail on your server or some other way?
This email issue is
literally killing my forum and has been for years without me even realizing it.