>> News: OUTSOURCE to supernews.com for $100 a month. No hardware, nor
>> headaches. Excellent service. No bandwidth wasted on news.
>
>Alternative: dNews from http://www.netwinsite.com is a terific product. If
>you plan on heavy usage, plan on a dual P200 or PPro200 with 64 - 128 MB
>Ram. You are talking about maintaining a 10 GB database here, "Don't" run
>any other process on this machine. Don't run any other mission critical
>apps on this machine, You may have to take it down from time to time.
We were running Netmanage's IFS, which was also very good. We had 30
GB/256 MB RAM on the machine, and it wasn't enough. Three feeds. Chewed
up a TON of bandwidth (DNEWS can do a sucking feed, but I don't recommend
it). Why invest $10,000 in a machine that can do this, and thousands
more in support for it, when you can outsource it so cheaply? Supernews'
service has been outstanding. No outages since we've used them, only minor
problems (for example, their system date got set six hours off last night,
and wouldn't take posts for a few hours -- could happen to anyone).
>> Mail: Many alternatives NOT based on per-user, but unlimited accounts:
>> www.rockliffe.com $595 (?)
>> www.ntmail.co.uk $995 give or take, depending on options
>
>My Choice ....
>> www.ipswich.com $495
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I ruled out Ipswich (and SLMail) based on my experiences with their other
products. SLMailFW for Win95 couldn't handle the load of a single mailing
list of a hundred users, 20 posts a day, on a P-200. Thus, I don't use
their products. Ipswich, I am VERY leery of, since there are numerous bugs
in WhatsUp that remain uncorrected, especially in the network layout tool
dialog that can cause the list of monitored objects to get totally
corrupted. If they can't code something that simple, then I don't want to
trust them to mission critical, multi-threaded Email tasks. I never even
looked at the product, based on my experience with WhatsUp. I bought and
use WhatsUp because at the time it was the only such product out there, but
now MediaHouse has split their monitoring our of IISA, and it works much
better.
>All in all I would get several servers. If you plan on getting LARGE
>follow below & even spit it up with a server for each function. If you are
>not going to get any bigger than 500 - 1000 users, substitute the following
>with P166 or Dual systems.
Unquestionably, split them up early. It'll save you the headaches of that
later.