What do you mean I can’t send more than 500 emails an hour?

This question was posed to me when I recently moved a client’s website to another hosting plan.  Yes, according to Hostgator, when signed up with their shared hosting plan, you are limited to 500 emails an hour for the whole website.  Seems like a nice ceiling, but when you have employees that need to send message to their distribution lists then that could possibly pose a problem.

What happens if you hit the 500 mark?  Well, every additional email will be tagged as undeliverable due to exceeding the hourly quota.

What was interesting to me was that they used to be with Brinkster.com, but didn’t have this problem.  I was curious and called Brinkster…they actually told me that their policy is no more than 500 emails per-day! 

This would leave me to believe that maybe they were sending emails out, but chances are 90% of the emails were sent to the undeliverable black hole of bad email messages that bounce and bounce and bounce.

There are two solutions to this problem.

1) Signup for the dedicated server option at hostgator – This allows you to send unlimited emails without having email lock-out issues.  The big problem with this solution is that it will cost you atleast $179 dollars a month.  BUT, if you want piece of mind and you don’t feel like signing up with a bulk emailing web service then this is your best bet.

2) Signup for a mailing list manager web service such as Aweber or Email Aces.  This way you can keep your bulk emailing initiatives on a separate server (as you should!).  Plus these sites are made just for bulk mailing and guarantee 90%+ delivery rates.

I personally prefer Aweber because you can easily setup “views” if your email prospects and even send out custom newsletters according to your views.

EmailAces is not as robust, but its entry-level list management setup is great for any noob to get started with bulk mailing.