Pair’s Double Entendre
August 10th, 2007Tom Harrington has written a couple articles recently about running a customer mailing list for an indie software business.
Running a customer mailing list
The second one’s ominous title has to do with the fact that Harrington’s hosting provider, pair Networks, has a restrictive policy about using their servers to send out large quantities of email. Tom’s “solved” the problem by signing up for another account at TextDrive, which is more relaxed about the behavior.
It’s amazing how common it is for Pair customer’s (myself included) to be simultaneously ecstatic about the company’s well-deserved reputation for stability, while also perennially bummed about the failure of the company to support some “basic” functionality that is taken for granted on other hosts.
Perhaps that’s why they named the company “pair.” You’ll need to pair it up with another shared hosting provider if you want to run your own mailing list, run Django or Ruby on Rails, host a Subversion repository, use your database to expose usage statistics to users, and any number of other useful web developer inclinations you might have.
This is why Red Sweater runs as a sort of chimera, distributed between DreamHost and pair. I realize that pair’s stability is in some significant sense due to their strict use policies, but in some cases the decisions seem to be more political or inertial than technical.
If some hosting provider can strike a balance between DreamHost’s reputation for indulgence and pair’s reputation for stability, it will be a force to be contended with.
August 10th, 2007 at 6:06 am
Pair does have a mailing list service, pairlist.com, to which you can get access if you have an account:
http://www.pair.com/services/mailing_lists/
At the moment it’s free but they will be charging for it in future.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:05 am
This is one reason I run my own webserver out of my office on a DSL line (using Mac OS X Server). It gives me complete control of my setup. I also use a fairly old-school Mac mailing list program, Macjordomo–http://macjordomo.med.cornell.edu/. In terms of communicating with my customers, it works for me.
August 10th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Rob, you’re correct that Pair offers a mailing list service, and I did investigate it. However I found it completely unsuitable for my needs– as explained in some detail in the first of my posts that Daniel linked. PairList has been in an “… ongoing testing and development phase…” for something like five years now. The real problem is their choice of mailing list software, and the difficulty in configuring and customizing it. Being free (for however long) was not a good enough reason to keep banging my head against their solution trying to make it do what I wanted.
August 10th, 2007 at 9:24 am
I swear by MediaTemple. I was a TextDrive fan, but their support is lackluster whereas MediaTemple gives me great support when I need it (rarely).
MacZealots, PocketTweets, client Rails apps and more are hosted off my MT boxes. I love it.
Best of all, unlike Dreamhost, they are transparent when they have issues or fuck up.
August 10th, 2007 at 10:18 am
I agree with Kevin, having your our server solves many of those sorts of problems.
It’s a more expensive option as you’ll probably want to co-locate in a data center, but it’s nice to be “root” and be able (within reason) to do whatever you want. Though that’s just one more hassle to have to deal with, I suppose.
August 13th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
I suppose MediaTemple may have some advantages over DreamHost but they are located in the same building and also went down last summer when the entire facility had a power outage and the shared UPS and back up diesels all failed. You’ve got to give it to Pair for their stability.