For this tutorial, you’ll need to be running your apps in PHP and can configure it, and have the ability to install software to your server. If you’re still reading, I’ll assume you’re comfortable with both. Let’s go!

Important update: see bottom of post

The Usual: Memcache

You may be familiar with memcache. Memcache is a simple, fast, in-memory caching system that is used for caching data that is requested often. By using memcache, you avoid the need of repeatedly pulling information from disk or from a database query. This speeds up serving requests and reduces the need for disk accesses.  It can easily be made to expand the caching across servers, so you are not bound to the memory limits of a single server. Your memcache storage can be as large as the added memory of many servers.

Memcache and Sessions

In PHP, user sessions are stored on disk by default. This is fine for keeping track of sessions for small traffic and a small number of users, capable of being handled by a single server. But once your site is getting heavy traffic, the repeated disk accesses for session files will start to slow down requests, as well as exhausting the filesystem’s capability of handling many files per directory.

Should you decide to increase the number of servers to handle the traffic (using a load balancer) you’ll run into the next challenge: users who hit one server on one request may not end up on the same server on the next request. So the session that had their logged-in state may be on server A, but on next request they get routed to server B which doesn’t have a session for them, or may have a logged-out session for them. So the user ends up being logged in or logged out, and it’s at the whim of the load balancer.  Some load balancers are smart in that they will keep a user “stuck” to one server for session’s sake.

The next logical step is to put sessions in memcache or in the database, so that it won’t matter what server the user ends up on, their session will still be available for the request. Putting sessions in the database is better than files, but still involves a database request for page request.  The better option is to put sessions in memcache. Since all servers share the same memcache storage pool, each has access to all the sessions, and the session lookups are super fast.

The Problem with Memcache

Memcache is great, but once you start running low on memory (as you cache more info) lesser-used items in the cache will be destroyed to free up more space for new items. This can result in users getting logged out.  Also, if one of the servers in the pool fails or gets rebooted, all the data it was holding is lost, and then the cache must get “warmed up” again.

What’s a developer to do?

Membase, the Next Big Thing

Membase is memcache with data persistence. And it doesn’t use something like memcache, it is memcache. So if you have code that already is using memcache, you can have it use membase right away, usually with no change to your code.

The improvement of having data persistence is that if you need to bring down a server, you don’t have to worry about all that dainty, floaty data in memory that is gonna get burned. Since membase has replication and persistence built-in, you can feel free to restart a troublesome server without fear of your database getting pounded as the caches need to refill, or that a set of unlucky users will get logged out.  I’ll let you read about all the many other advantages of membase here.  It’s much more than I’ve mentioned here.

Membase is a NoSQL solution, so if you’ve been looking to try one out but haven’t had data problems big enough, this is your opportunity to jump in.

Membase server comes in two flavors: community and enterprise. The community version is open source, and doesn’t have some of the high-end features of the enterprise version.  But for our project here and many of your projects, the community version will be more than enough.  Enterprise is not necessarily for the bootstrapped. You get more features and support, but you’ll pay thousands for it.

Who’s using it? Between Membase and its cousin, Couchbase (based on CouchDB) there are a number of high performance and high-traffic sites using them.  And all ReadyPrompt sites use it.

The Tutorial

Let’s start in on the real meat and potatoes here.

I’m going to focus on an Debian/Ubuntu-based package install, since I’m fond of it and stopped liking installing from source years ago. Those on other Linux platforms should be comfortable here, however.  No worries, folks.

Cleaning up old Junk

Since Membase provides memcache within its install, we don’t want any previously installed memcache stuff hanging around and messing up our mojo.

These are the Ubuntu packages you’ll want to get rid of:

• php5-memcache
• php5-memcached
• memcache (may or may not exist as a package for your Linux flavor)
• memcached

That’s right, get rid of them. Just apt-get remove ‘em.

In addition, to make sure you remove any memcache.ini or memcached.ini that may be sitting in /etc/php5/conf.d

Then run:

service apache2 restart

to restart apache.

Getting on the Right Memcache

You’ll notice I listed memcache and memcached. We’re going to stick to memcached for the remainder of this tutorial. Yes, it matters.

Getting the code

Since we’re staying away from the Enterprise version here, let’s go straight to the download page.

As you can see, there are binaries available for a number of platforms, including 64-bit versions.

After downloading, let’s run (on Ubuntu 64-bit):

dpkg -i membase-server-community_x86_64_1.7.1.1.deb

Like I said, once it’s done with a very quick install, you’ll have memcached installed and running. You can run this to see the services it runs, including its bundled memcached:

ps –aef | grep mem

Now point your browser to http://yourserverip:8091

If the browser just spins or gives you an error, you’ll need to edit your firewall to allow TCP access to port 8091 from outside.

When the membase admin on your server shows up, you’ll see this nice welcome:

On the next screen you’ll enter the path to where you want data to be stored (or leave it as default), and memory size option for setting up a new cluster. We’re going to do a cluster of one for this tutorial.

Next, you’ll set how much memory you’ll want for you first bucket. Oh yeah, I didn’t discuss buckets. You can save things to separate buckets. Investigate.

I also set it to have 1 backup copy via replication.

Next to last detail: enable software notifications:

 
The very last step is setting a username and password (not depicted).

Once you’ve set your password, you’re in! Soon you will see these graphs full of very hot lines.

The next step is to install php5-memcached:

apt-get install php5-memcached

This will also install memcached, as you can see from the output:

Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information… Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libevent-1.4-2 libmemcached2 memcached
Suggested packages:
libcache-memcached-perl libmemcached
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libevent-1.4-2 libmemcached2 memcached php5-memcached
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 39 not upgraded.

This additional memcached will conflict in a subtle way with the one membase installed. Not to worry. Just get rid of it:

apt-get remove memcached

You should have a new file that php5-memcached made for you: /etc/php5/conf.d/memcached.ini

with this as the content:
extension = memcached.so

Changing PHP to Handle Membase Sessions

Since membase is sitting right behind memcache, you’ll still use memcache session handling. Edit your php.ini file (or add a custom ini file to conf.d directory) with this:

session.save_handler = memcached
session.save_path = "localhost:11211"

Now just restart apache and you’re done.

service apache2 restart

If you fire up a phpinfo() you’ll see this in your session section (edited for brevity):

You should see “memcached” as one of your registered save handlers, as well as your session.save_handler.  You should see the save path as above also.

Updating Your Existing Memcache Code

If you are already using memcache as a caching mechanism for other things, you’ll need to make sure you’re using the Memcached library. It’s not greatly different from the Memcache library, so converting your code to use it should be trivial.

You’ll need to change lines like this:

$memcache = new Memcache;
$memcache->connect(‘memcache_host’, 11211);

to this:

$memcache = new Memcached;
$memcache->addServer(‘memcache_host’, 11211);

The expiration you use for set() operations does not need to change. Read more about expirations here.

In general, I don’t like to deal with Memcached library directly. I wrap it in a utility class so that if I need to add more membase/memcache servers in the future or change the way I create hash keys, I only have to do it in one place.

If needed, at any time you may restart membase by issuing:

service membase-server restart

Hope this tutorial helped you out.

Update (Nov. 4th, 2011): After further checking and integration, some frameworks require php5-memcache. Installing both php5-memcache and php5-memcached  causes no weird side effects. They are just separate libraries for talking to memcached.

Update (Nov. 5th, 2011): You’ll notice over time that the items in cache are increasing and rarely decreasing, and it’s nothing to be afraid of.  Explained here in a post by Mikkel Ovesen.

Update (Jan. 6th, 2011): Some colleagues have run into troubles with this approach, as PHP’s memcached does not store session expiration correctly. That means that when your membase runs out of memory, it stops working instead of freeing up old sessions. I’m researching and will update when I find out a solution.  Please comment below if you can help.

Call to Action

Did you discover anything new or helpful you’d like to share about this tutorial? Let everyone know in a comment below!

Early Friday morning, I was thinking that if I could get an instant domain search going, I could hook it up to Hover.com and send them traffic (because they’re awesome) and get some affiliate revenue when someone bought a domain with them.  After work Friday I started coding, and Sunday night I finished it: http://dotcomornothing.com  Ah, weekend projects.

At the time I started coding, I wasn’t a Hover affiliate.  I didn’t have an appropriate site to mention on the affiliate application, so this site was made before I even filed for approval. Glad I was approved. Whew!

The folks at Hover were pretty enthused to see this, and the dev team was stoked:

Woot! That was awesome. I ran it by the Dev team and their reactions were, "See? Now THAT”s how we like to see people use our [~stuff~]". LOL

Actually, funny that you were able to figure that out with the domain look-up, because that’s new and you couldn’t do that before. Dev just updated some code recently, so they’re quite impressed with themselves now, because this is exactly what they wanted to happen.

I know the integration of the coupon code is non-existent, but hopefully they will have a way to integrate that in so you won’t have to copy/paste it.  Just not supported right now except thru this link: http://hover.com/ReadyPrompt

Why Hover? I’ve been a big fan since last November. You may remember my post “Ditching GoDaddy for Hover”.

There was some coding trickiness to building the site, and there is a lot of optimization and caching going on, but it’s blazing fast and helps you cut through the jungle of reserved domains to help you find the next great domain.

For some explanation on the name and some SEO fodder, I had to put some hidden text in the page:

For anyone buying a domain for a new startup, it’s an important, and sometimes terribly expensive choice.  This post by Fred Wilson: Finding And Buying A Domain Name is a good start, and is immediately followed by an outstanding comment on why dot com is the only TLD that matters and continues on to how to negotiate a dot-com name by contacting the domain owner cold.

Here’s the deal. The only domain name that matters for your startup is .com. Dotcoms got their name in the 90s because they represent business. Dot-com is the money TLD. Even companies like del.icio.us and bit.ly eventually had to buy their dot-com counterparts. There’s just too much mindshare about .com.

With domains, it’s “fake it till you make it”, so if your startup is successful with a .ly, .it, .us, or whatever, that’s great, but know that you’ll have to break down and get a name-appropriate dot-com once your business blows up.  One exception is short URLs. When going short, dropping one character and having that .co, .ly or similar is nice to have. I’ve got rdpt.co.

Now go get yourself a “fresh from the oven” dot-com!

Next post: How to Cache PHP Sessions in Membase

So what happens when you discover that a feature isn’t working properly in one obscure browser?  If you’re like me, you let it go. 

There are quite a few obscure browsers out there, and my obscure meaning that the percent of the overall users using them is very little: Opera, Konqueror, Seamonkey, SRWare Iron, K-Meleon, Lunascape, FlashPeak SlimBrowser, Songbird, Beonex, Camino, Galeon, Epiphany, Kazehakase, Avant Browser, Maxthon, and I’m sure the list continues.  Even well known browsers (though older versions) fall into this category: Firefox 2, IE 5.5, etc.

I pretty much stop at 3%. If your browser’s share of use is less than 3%, I’m not fixing the issue.  Even if your given browser is 100% standards compliant and scores 100 on the Acid3 test, you’re out of luck with me.

I also stop at 3% on not only browsers, but also operating systems. Still hanging onto Windows ME? Not going to test or fix my apps on that.

When it comes to mobile, you’ll have to find the percentage you’re comfortable with. There are just so many handsets and form factors out there.

Finding out the Cut-off

Where do you find out what to cut out?  The main thing I use is Google Analytics stats for zKorean. Since it is a high-traffic site with a good spread of users across many ages and demographics, I’m pretty comfortable with it.  I also tend to use W3Schools stats (yes I know there are W3Schools haters, don’t give in to hate).  But be warned that sites like this have very tech-heavy visitors like programmers and designers which can skew the OS and browser numbers towards Linux, Mac, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, so take their stats but keep it in mind.

See how Opera is below the 3% cut-off? Sorry, Opera users.  Then I have to dig in to each browser and see where its cutoff is for its per-version market share.  Your favorite spreadsheet program comes in handy here.   W3Schools breaks it out for you already, so you can put away your calculator.  But if you’re doing it on your own, and browser X has a 55% share, but it’s newest version only has 12% of that, then the newest version is at 6.6% of overall share (0.55 x 0.12 = 0.066, then multiply by 100).

Love Thy Customer

But when responding to a customer about it, just be apologetic with a little friendly prodding:

“I’m sorry that you’ve had an issue with using the sorting feature on x browser. I would like to help, but our company does not have the resources to test across a large number of browsers and platforms.  The best we can do is make sure that it runs on the most common configurations. In the future, hopefully we’ll have the ability to run our tests across even the rarest of browser/OS combinations.”

Some of you may say, “well x browser uses the Gecko engine, just like Firefox, are you saying you don’t support it?”. I support the browser, not the engine. Since browser makers are always looking to add some feature to make their browser special, all bets are off if they break the rendering or goof up behaviors.

Don’t be That Kind of Designer

Don’t take the other extreme, either. I’ve seen many a condescending message from a “better than you” designer on a website.  I’m talking about the kind of web designer that thumbs his nose at users running IE, or visitors that are using browsers that aren’t standards compliant (and I could rant on how browsers that tout standards-compliance always add in special sauce to push their own standards, but I won’t). If a browser is below 3%, like IE6, you can show a nice message to your visitor, or let your pages degrade somewhat gracefully.  But if I happen to be on IE8 and checking out your site, I don’t expect “Your browser is weaksauce and doesn’t support web standards.  Go away and come back on a real browser.”  Almost as bad are sites that just fall apart on IE (even IE9) because the designer didn’t think it worth their time to even check.  Yes, the box model is different.  I get it.  But regular Joe web user is not going to blame their browser for how bad your site looks. They are just going to think you suck as a designer.

Going Large

If you are Google or Yahoo, you have the resources (people power) and extensive automation/testing systems to test across a larger range of possible platform/browser combinations. So Yahoo and Google don’t cut off at 3%.  They go below 1%.  The reason is they can afford to not alienate users on obscure configurations.  And each 1% represents millions of people.  It’s a noble goal to be inclusive as possible, but within the limits of what you can handle.

What Do You Think?

Comment below on where you think the cutoff should be.  How far do you go to ensure the experience is pleasant to a variety of users?

Next post: I’ve Joined Earndit as an Advisor

After using GoDaddy for about 4 years, I ditched them and switched all my domains to Hover.

Why?

GoDaddy is the Hooters of the domain registrar world. Their self-controversial “too hot for TV” ads are a pathetic attempt to stand out in the competitive domain registrations space. I’m not their target market because I look for quality, and sex appeal does not compare to quality. I don’t want to support GoDaddy for the same reason I don’t go to Hooters or bikini barista drive-thrus. You may have really good hot wings or coffee, but I don’t want to support or encourage that type of marketing. Let your product speak for itself, without the sexy gimmick.

I was even going to use a screenshot to show how ridiculous their marketing is, but I’d rather promote Hover.

GoDaddy adds so many extra services to the checkout process, the vast majority of which I would never need, and makes me uneasy that I’ll add something on accident and regret it.  The only additional service I ever used beyond domain registration was the private registrations through Domains By Proxy, which I profiled in a separate post. DBP is good stuff.

Hover.com

Hover is a nice little oasis in the polluted world of domain registrars.  Their service is simple and it works.

I first heard about them on This Week in Tech (TWiT).

For $25, they will handle all your domain transfers for you, whether you have 1 domain or 1000. For each domain you transfer, your initial registration fee is only $10 each.  For that, you get the domain registration PLUS anonymous registration service.

And it’s anonymous registration service that you don’t need to make another account for on another site. It’s built-in to Hover.com.

For all other domains you register afterwards, the price is $15/year, which includes anonymous registration.  With GoDaddy, my domain renewals were $18.47 per year ($9.48 for domain registration, and $8.99 for anonymous registration). So you actually save money with Hover.com.

Use my coupon code “ReadyPrompt” and save 10%: http://hover.com/ReadyPrompt

With Hover.com, you get complete DNS and Name Server control.  Check out the nice UI (update: Summer 2011, they made the DNS UI even better, not as pictured):

The customer service ay Hover is outstanding. When you call, you get a person answering the phone.

The gent who handled my domain transfers recreated all of the DNS and MX records, switched the name servers, and filled in all of the contact records.

The “Hover”

Hover also offers a free service on all of your domains: the ability to create a “Hover”.  I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concept, but it has to do with forwarding. You can create a subdirectory on your domain that will go to another location, or make your domain forward to an entirely different domain altogether. Some nice DNS magic.

But transferring domains is expensive…

I understand.  I went ahead and did all of mine at once, and now I have all of my domains set until 2012.  So I won’t have to worry about it next year.

Remember that when you transfer you’re also adding a year to the expiration.

You can transfer one at a time as your domains get close to expiration, but I was just ready for a change.

Next post: Protect your Startup with a Delaware LLC

When I first moved from a shared host to a dedicated server, and had my sites set up to send email (to customers), I immediately received rejections from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and many other email servers (this was before there was Gmail).  The rejections all shared the same reason.  The IP block my server was in was blacklisted.  That means that the IP address of my server was within a list of neighboring IP addresses that was blacklisted.  It seems people grabbed dedicated servers and used them as spamming machines.

After attempting to communicate with these email services and get my IP whitelisted, I raised a ticket with my server host and they had a solution: smart host.

This smart host mechanism allows me to set my server to forward all outgoing mail to another server that only accepts from specified domains.  Then it will send the email for me.  Since the forwarding server is in a nice IP space, the email won’t get bounced.

If you run into this problem and your server provider won’t or can’t do this for you, there is a very affordable service to do it for you.

AuthSMTP

I discovered this company around the same time I had the email issue, and ended up using them at a company I worked for that was running into a similar problem with their email campaigns (that were opt-in and on the “on the level”).  It is what is called an SMTP relay.  That means that you send email through them instead of directly into the wild.

The pricing is reasonable.  If you’re sending fewer than 1000 emails a month, you’ll only pay $24 a year.  I made that bold-faced so you’ll notice.  It’s only $2 per month.

Dumping Sendmail

If you have a hosted email solution like Rackspace Mail, you can use them as your SMTP relay and save money.  Since you would normally use their service to send mail from your mail client using SMTP (with authentication), you can use an SMTP library in your code (PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc) to send mail.  It’s easy to set up and since you are using authentication in sending email, your mail provider can be assured it’s you.  Here’s an example in PHP – note the SMTPAuth usage and username and password.  Thereafter, you may completely remove sendmail and postfix from your server.  There is no need for your server to act like a mail server at all.  Like I mentioned long ago, that’s a pain to manage on your own.

Next post: merchandising, merchandising, merchandising

So how do you avoid this?

The trick is to display your email in a way that the user viewing the site sees the email address and can click it or copy it into their email program, while robots only see a jumble of characters that to a machine does not look like an email address.

There are a number of sites to help you.  My favorite is David Grayson’s Email Hider: http://www.davidegrayson.com/emailhider/

What it will do is replace some characters with HTML entities, which are readable by your browser and will display as normal characters.  The probability that a character in your email will be replaced is determined by the second number.  The closer it is to 1, the more characters will be replaced.  0.6 is a good balance.

There are other sites, too.  You can find them using a search for “email obfuscator”.

I don’t recommend making an image of your email address because then your visitors will have to copy it visually and try not to make mistakes, which is common in long email addresses or noisy images where your email address does not appear clearly.

An Extra Note

Avoid using certain email addresses with your domain. Very common addresses like info@yourdomain, webmaster@yourdomain, and sales@yourdomain are already built-in to spam lists.  It’s better to use something friendly but also less common.  Let’s get original and creative, yes?

Next post: when your server is in a bad neighborhood

So how do you go about checking what your site looks like in IE7 when you already have IE8?  Or how do you check it on Firefox under Windows if you’re on a Mac? Let’s dive in.

Interactive Options

VMWare

Running an OS in a virtual environment (virtual machine) allows you to interact with your site like you’re sitting at another computer.  With VMWare you can make multiple instances of different versions of Windows and Linux, with multiple browsers on each.

VMWare Fusion is popular with developers on the Mac, because they can test their sites on Internet Explorer and other browsers running on Windows.
 

Windows XP Mode

Windows XP Mode is part of Windows 7 and free, and as the name suggests, it is Windows XP running as a virtual machine.  XP mode is made for running applications that aren’t ready for Windows 7 or are legacy applications.  You must have Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate to run Windows XP Mode.  To install it, go here.

Multiple IE

So how can you run multiple versions of Internet Explorer without running each on its own virtual machine?  Multiple IE is the gem you seek.  In one package it will install versions 3 through 6 of IE.  My advice is to start on a fresh VM install of Windows XP, upgrade it to IE 7, and then install this.  Then use IE 8 outside the VM or in a different VM.

 
It isn’t working very well under Windows 7 but installing it on pre-7 Windows under VMWare or on XP Mode it works like a charm.

Spoon

Want the interactivity without the installation hassles? Spoon has a small browser plug-in that lets you play with other browsers running in remote installations.  Want to mess with Safari on Windows, or IE6 on Mac? Click and run.

This site has multiple applications that show off this ability: Gimp, Eclipse, even OpenOffice.  I suggest playing some of the games, too.  Hordes of Orcs and Cogs were a lot of fun.

Screenshot-only Options

Abode BrowserLab

Aside from running VMs to get full interactivity under another browser, just getting a screenshot can be a huge help.  Just made that left column 180 pixels wide and want to make sure it didn’t break the layout in Safari 3? Adobe BrowserLab is a slick, fast method to get these screenshots.

Just choose the browsers you want screens from and go:

Includes rulers and the option to have it take the screen shot a few seconds after page load if you have some Ajax or other post-page loading going on.

You can also stack multiple screens (onion skin mode) over each other to see where things may not be lining up as you expected.  See below:

BrowserLab is free and integrates with CS5.  You just need an Adobe login if you don’t already have one.

BrowserShots

BrowserShots is pretty nifty.  Want to see what your site looks like in a wide variety of browsers on Linux, Windows, and Mac?  No problem. 

This is a nice service for the variety it offers, but it takes a while depending on the number of browsers you choose.  Your request gets queued with others and it can take up to 30 minutes to get all the screenshots back.

 
Want to skip the lines? Go for priority service at $29.95/month: http://browsershots.org/priority

Call for Comment

Do you have any suggestions? How do you test your site in other browsers? Comment below.

Next post: interview with Medizzle

Google Apps

You probably have a personal Gmail account, and using Google mail for your business isn’t that different, but instead of an @gmail.com address, you can use your own domain.  This professional (premium) version of Gmail is part of the Google Apps suite of services.  This version of Gmail is called Premier Edition.  If you’re expecting supercheap, it’s not.  It’s twice as much as Rackspace Mail, but along with that you’ll get a 25GB mailbox, 1GB Google Docs storage, 10GB storage + 500 MB shared on Google Sites, and a nice integration into Google Talk (you’ll get notified of mail even when you’re not logged in to mail).  It’s really a suite more than just mail service.  The pricing, to be exact, is $50 per user account per year (billed annually).  Compared to Rackspace mail at $2 per month per mailbox, Google’s suite comes out to ~$4.17 per month.  Either way it’s not likely to break your startup’s budget.

To me, the extra $2 is worth it for Google Docs and Calendar.  For working on teams, having a central repository for your super secret startup’s super secret documents is great for sharing and collaboration.  And it will save you from having to spend so much on a copy of Office for everyone.  Then again, you could have everyone download OpenOffice, but working on docs in the Google Docs site saves you from editing and uploading and then having to edit and upload again later, and you and a co-worker can be in the same spreadsheet at the same time.  Extreme Excel anyone?

So why don’t I use Google Apps? Because I’m a loner, a rebel.  I’m a one-man show, ya dig? I don’t need no team.

But wait, there’s more…

DNAmail

I’m adding DNAmail due to their wide range of services.  So before you plunk down money for Google Apps, you could save 21 cents a month and get real humans to help you move your mail.  Let’s go down the list of what DNAmail offers:

Google Apps: DNAmail is an authorized reseller, so there’s no funny business.  But if you sign up for Google Apps through DNAmail, they’ll offer free 24/7 support to help you get set up and migrate your mail for you.

Hosted Exchange & Sharepoint: Exchange hosting pricing ranges from $2.95 a month for a personal account with no frills and web access to $12.95/per month for unlimited mail (you know for those managers who have massive mailboxes because they’re afraid of getting sued or fired if they can’t find that spreadsheet you made them 4 years ago).  The middle price point is $8.95 a month, and for that you get a 3GB mailbox.  For both the $8.95 and $12.95 option you’ll get free Microsoft Outlook, MAPI, POP and IMAP access, and 50MB free Sharepoint storage.  To increase your Sharepoint space, see additional pricing here, which ranges from $9.95/per month for 1GB up to $79.95/month for 5GB.

Oh yeah, and “DNAmail, DNAmail, everybody loves DNAmail” to quote Jason Calacanis.  Since DNAmail sponsors This Week in Startups, I gotta send ‘em some love.

Next post: listen to your customers, not your users

These days setting up an email server is pretty easy. But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean you should do it.

editor’s note: officially, I write “e-mail”, but it looks better as “email”

Why NOT to host your own email:

• if it’s hosted on your web server, you risk DOS attack if you get flooded with mail
• over time it becomes a pain to manage (software updates, security concerns)
• if you are hosting IMAP, you have to back up a LOT of data over time since it keeps all your mail on server
• if your web server’s IP address is in a “bad neighborhood”, your email will get bounced back a lot, forcing you to send through a different mail host anyway (called a smart host)

The Do-It-Yourselfer

If you decide you must host it on your own server, the easiest way to do it is with Qmail, a sendmail replacement.  QmailRocks is the best tutorial from start to finish – including installation of web-based mail interface, antivirus scanning with Clam Antivirus, and SpamAssassin.  Once you go down this road, however, it’s all on you.

The Easy Life

For those who would rather spend their time building their business instead of babysitting an email server, I have a few solutions, depending on your cash and your organization.

For today, and continuing to tomorrow, I’ll go over some hosted email providers, what they offer, and some pricing.

Rackspace Mail

After hosting my own mail on my server for about 4 years I dumped it and went to Rackspace mail.  At $2 per mailbox per month, I have IMAP service (POP is an option), 10GB of space, and attachments up to 50MB.  My email is backed up every night, and if needed I can restore it myself from the control panel.

I currently have 6 mailboxes (since I run different businesses), but have unlimited aliases.

They do the anti-spam and antivirus stuff for me.

I can check mail from my mail client (Thunderbird) and BlackBerry, and they offer a web-based interface that’s nice, but I don’t use it.

For those needing hosted Exchange, they do that also, but your mailbox will be limited to 2GB.  Exchange is $10 per mailbox per month.  Unless you know you need Exchange, you’re not going to need it.

If you don’t know the difference between POP and IMAP, IMAP is a protocol for handling mail that keeps all mail on the server and downloads it to your email client when you check your mail, but keeps a copy on the server and marks whether you’ve read it or not.  So if you check mail on your main box and then go to your laptop and check mail, you won’t see the messages you just read as “new” messages.  The same goes for sent mail.  It keeps the sent mail synced for you, too.  With POP, on the other hand, your mail is downloaded to your mail client and then removed from the server (although you can keep a copy there), but mail clients will not be able to sync POP like it can IMAP.

Need Exchange? I’ll have a cheaper Exchange option tomorrow.  But if you need Exchange, you’re probably not cheap anyway, amirite?

to be continued tomorrow…

Next post: email for your startup, part 2

We bought that SSL certificate from VeriSign for $495 per year.  That was 2003.

Nowadays, you can get an SSL certificate for around $50.  With the explosion of SSL providers and resellers, there are bargains everywhere.  Last year I purchased a certificate from RapidSSL for $49.  You can find the same certificate at wide range of prices from different resellers, from $15 to $79.

Does it work? Yes. It’s an SSL certificate that supports Strong 128/256 bit encryption, which is industry standard SSL.

And compared to the pain I went through with VeriSign back in the day (faxing documents, letterhead, etc) it’s a savings of time, too.  With RapidSSL there’s a pretty fast verification process and you’re done.

“But I found this other certificate that’s cheaper.” Great, buy it.  Like I said, there are many providers and each has many resellers.  But if you’re looking to save $5 by going to Stinky Ralph’s Discount SSL Certs, I don’t know about that.  Use your good judgment.

Next post: my BlackBerry