Starting a Newsletter for my Site - but Clueless on Logistics - HELP!!

[staffjam]

Hi,

I am starting a newsletter for my site Oilprice.com - but i am clueless when it comes to distribution.
Does anyone here have any experience with what needs to happen, who to use, what is important, etc...?

My Hosting provider only allows me to send 1000 mails per hour.
This won't be aproblem in the beginning - but as the list gorws it could become one. Are there any companies that manage this sort of thing for you?

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

[HomerJ]

Hi,

I am starting a newsletter for my site Oilprice.com - but i am clueless when it comes to distribution.
Does anyone here have any experience with what needs to happen, who to use, what is important, etc...?

My Hosting provider only allows me to send 1000 mails per hour.
This won't be aproblem in the beginning - but as the list gorws it could become one. Are there any companies that manage this sort of thing for you?

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

if your webhost puts a cap on the amount of emails you can send and you want to exceed that you basically have two options:

- you can use a hosted email marketing service. mail gets sent through their servers and you would pay either based on the number of contacts you have or the number of emails sent per month

examples:

aweber
constant contact
big response
... there are literally dozens if not hundreds

- you could buy a downloadable email marketing software (or use an open source one but they generally suck) and host the software on your own server but send the actual email through a third party server like SMTP.com

open source: PHPlist
commercial: Interspire, also a few others but i cant recall the names

the hosted services would be the most hassle-free and dont require any installation, setup etc. The balance is they will generally cost more over the long run since you pay a recurring fee. You could always start out with one of these since you dont have a big list yet, then later down the road if you develop a huge mailing list you could consider switching to self-hosted if warranted

hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions

[staffjam]

Homer - thanks for the advice - it's just what i was looking for and i will be taking a look at the services you suggested.