I recently moved a customer’s PHPlist installation to BlueHost. As you may know, BlueHost (along with Hosting.com) is one of my preferred hosting providers.

The move itself went well.  I installed PHPlist via the Simple Scripts installation process.  I exported the list from the old system and imported it into the new system.  I copied and pasted templates and the like.  We were ready to go!

Of course, that’s when everything fell apart.

The customer’s mailing list has about 550 names.  When I sent the newsletter everything looked normal.  Then I noticed the system saying that it had NOT sent emails to 415 members of the list.  I called BlueHost to ask about it.  The technical support person was pleasant, but not helpful.  I did some more investigation and called a second time.  Again, this person was pleasant, but didn’t have any answers.

In the meantime I tried sending the email again.  The system said it sent 150 emails, but 265 emails could not be sent.  Hmmm . . . 150 seemed like a pretty round number.  I looked in the BlueHost knowledge base for “150″.  Guess what I found:

There is a default limit on all hosting accounts of 150 email messages sent per hour. This is a policy to help control spam on the Internet and does not apply to your inbound email. You can receive as many emails as will fit in the email account’s quota.

I called BlueHost a third time and my customer’s limit was immediately raised to 750.  So the problem is solved, but I am very disappointed with BlueHost.  The first technical support person I called should have been able to solve this problem.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Online Newsletters, Recommended Products/Companies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.