Yesterday I had to upgrade a bunch of websites running certain software (or scripts) because of a security hole. A bunch of other people’s websites have already been defaced because of these holes. Which brings me to one very important lesson I learnt not too long ago, sometimes you want to pay someone monthly fees to use a service on their web servers.
Not long ago, I decided an autoresponder is a must have (every marketer tells you that right) but I was too cheap to use a monthly service. Being the geek that I am, I decided to just get a script to install on my server and ended up with this really cheapo no frills but does the job script that was oh… maybe 5 years old at least – a dinosaur in Internet years. I happily installed it, everything ran fine like 99% of my installs and happily went off to bed.
The next morning, I got 2 emails from my web host. The first said, “we believe you’re using your account for spam, your site is sending out 1000 emails in 10 seconds, we’re disabling your site until you fix it”. Whoa! The 2nd email only minutes later said, “sorry dude we shut down your account” read YOUR WEBSITE IS DELETED because your account is still sending so many emails. My heart dropped to the floor. It was like being served the death sentence. I’m being labelled a SPAMMER, my days working online are doomed etc etc. To cut a long story short it was not fun at all. Turns out the culprit was my handy dandy autoresponder. You can call me a lousy installer or whatever (incidently, I do this for a living so I do know what I’m doing), I swear the instructions were followed to a T but truth is, you just never know what is contained in the software you download off the Internet, even when you purchase it. So… the big lesson is when it comes to email related scripts, it pays to fork out some money for a good script and don’t settle for the $20-$30 ones OR use a paid service as long as you can afford it because:
- These businesses are established and their ISP’s and webhost companies know that is their business so they will have more bargaining power than you do when it comes to being accused.
- When there is an accusation being made at least your whole website won’t be shut down!
- Your risk is offloaded to them meaning, you don’t have to worry about anyone trying to manipulate a security hole in your newsletter or autoresponder software for their own evil spamming deeds
- You don’t have to maintain your software so that the next kid can come around and inject some malicious code
- Often email services can send out newsletters a lot faster than your own web host can. This is especially true if you’re sharing a web server and you have a large list. Most web hosts put a cap on how many emails you can send like 100 an hour.
I’ve done extensive research on newsletter scripts and customer feedbacks, if you’re really adverse to monthly services, then these two are the only server based ones to look at, Auto Response Plus and ListMail Pro.
