I quickly realized that no emails were being sent out and that the application was throwing an exception when trying to send out an email. So I started looking into the exceptions being thrown and then the cause. I thought it was incorrect settings, so I tried everything I could think of in configuration and additional settings that I found when searching the web. Unfortunately, none of them worked.
Then I found somewhere that mentioned that GoDaddy does not allow you to use external web servers. I am using Google Apps for this particular website and was trying to to send emails through Google’s mail server. Unfortunately this wasn’t possible, when hosting your website on GoDaddy you have to use GoDaddy’s mail servers.
GoDaddy’s mail servers were not going to work for me. First of all they limit the number of outgoing emails through their mail servers per day. This just didn’t work for me, I want a website that can expand with traffic if I get it, if suddenly 251 people want to sign up for my site in 24 hours I don’t want that last person to have issues because of restrictions put in place by GoDaddy. I also don’t feel that I should have to pay extra money for a service that I can get free elsewhere.
Secondly I am just not a fan of GoDaddy’s mail offering. It’s nice to get a free email address with your domain, I won’t deny I use mine very often. The problem I have with their mail server that unless you use their web mail application to send your email then there is no copy saved anywhere. With Google Mail all out going email is saved on GMail’s servers, including those sent programaticly. So if there is ever any question about if an email was sent or not I wouldn’t be able to check if I was using GoDaddy’s servers.
So the need for a new web hosting company that allows me to to use a custom mail server, as well as one that gave me better performance than I was currently getting on WordPress sites. So I started looking for a website hosting company that offered support for ASP.NET 4.0, SQL Server, WordPress and MySQL. I also needed to ability to host multiple domains within one hosting account, have domains hosted elsewhere and is relatively inexpensive.
I posted on Stack Overflow and asked several other people I knew trying to figure out what the best host would be. I looked into all the other major hosts and had no luck. I started looking into Windows Azure hosting and then ran into a huge nightmare with that. Finally someone on Stack Overflow recommended Arvixe for a web host.
I’ll have to admit that at first I had my reservations about Arvixe. So I decided to look into some reviews, then chatted with a customer service person and finally decided to try them out. It didn’t take long before I was hooked. I have so far been very impressed with the hosting services that I’ve received and I would recommend it to anyone who is currently looking for a new web hosting company.