MS Exchange Hosting Service Recommendation

fetster

fetster

fetster

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20 May 2004
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138
Can anybody recommend a reliable MS Exchange hosting provider that has unlimited mailbox size?

We currently use 1 & 1 but they have a 2GB mail size limit.

I would also like to be able to download a .pst file from the server occasionally as a backup measure.

Many thanks
 
There's no such thing as unlimited, its a gimmick that foolish people buy in to.

If you want a decent service for a fair price then I can recommend TSO Host, they have hosted our offsite mail boxes for over 2 years now and everything works great.
 
Every exchange implementation has a limit. 2GB is the recommended for Exchange 2007
Providers using 2010 will offer a 10GB limit which is again the recommended size for that version.

Though my mailbox limit is currently set to 500MB on our internal exchange. If a user has more than 2GB of mail (which is a mammoth amount) then you probably want to be looking at the causes rather than storage.
If people are regularly going to nudge that much then you'd want to be looking at a proper archiving solution or training users to get the best out of the service. (E.G Saving attachments somewhere not leaving them in the mailbox, and other general housekeeping)
 
axer said:
There's no such thing as unlimited, its a gimmick that foolish people buy in to.

If you want a decent service for a fair price then I can recommend TSO Host, they have hosted our offsite mail boxes for over 2 years now and everything works great.
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Doesn't look like TSO Host actually do Exchange mailboxes though.

We host Exchange 2007 mailboxes which also have a default limit of 2GB, so unless you've got other issues probably won't help you much. If interested though check out www.cobweb.com
 
TSO Host do exchange hosting
http://www.tsohost.co.uk/exchange-hosting.php
In fact I host my mailbox with them. However, their exchange hosting is probably one thing I feels that lets them down as they only run spam assassin and don't use any hardware solutions like barracuda or ironport. As such I do tend to get a lot of spam and I am thinking of changing.

If your looking at exchange hosting my recommendations

1) Go for Hosted Exchange 2010 if you can
2) Go with someone with decent spam protection

p.s. all these mailbox size limits do make me wonder. I run Exchange 2003 at work and we have circa 3000 mailboxes (looking to upgrade to 2010 in a few months) and we impose mailbox limits of 100mb. How some people need 10Gb is beyond me.
 
Westyfield2 said:
http://www.tsohost.co.uk/exchange-hosting.php ?
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Touche! :)

Still, £9.99 per month seems expensive to me!

Bry said:
TSO Host do exchange hosting
http://www.tsohost.co.uk/exchange-hosting.php
In fact I host my mailbox with them. However, their exchange hosting is probably one thing I feels that lets them down as they only run spam assassin and don't use any hardware solutions like barracuda or ironport. As such I do tend to get a lot of spam and I am thinking of changing.

If your looking at exchange hosting my recommendations

1) Go for Hosted Exchange 2010 if you can
2) Go with someone with decent spam protection

p.s. all these mailbox size limits do make me wonder. I run Exchange 2003 at work and we have circa 3000 mailboxes (looking to upgrade to 2010 in a few months) and we impose mailbox limits of 100mb. How some people need 10Gb is beyond me.
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Yeah it happens, I kid you not we have mailboxes on our platform that are well over 30GB!. I may take a look tomorrow and find the largest one. :P

Considering the disks designed needed, having small limits like yours makes sense for the platform you're on. Exchange 2010 simply perform better for less so can afford to use slower, larger disks and thus having users with large mailboxes isn't a problem.

We don't have any hardware spam protection in place, we used to use Barracudas but found them a little lacking. We currently get spam protection through Message Labs for all our clients. Tbh ML are alright, without it I know we'd be getting a lot of moaning people complaining about spam anyway!
 
Eulogy said:
Yeah it happens, I kid you not we have mailboxes on our platform that are well over 30GB!. I may take a look tomorrow and find the largest one. :P
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Yea , I just don't understand what they fill it up with. 30GB thats just nuts and could be cut down a lot i would hope

Eulogy said:
Considering the disks designed needed, having small limits like yours makes sense for the platform you're on. Exchange 2010 simply perform better for less so can afford to use slower, larger disks and thus having users with large mailboxes isn't a problem.
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Perfectly agree. I just sat my 60-662 (Exchange 2010) and passed with 980 so ready for our migration now. I still don't see us increasing mailbox size limits but then we got a couple of months to start planning it so we shall see

Eulogy said:
We don't have any hardware spam protection in place, we used to use Barracudas but found them a little lacking. We currently get spam protection through Message Labs for all our clients. Tbh ML are alright, without it I know we'd be getting a lot of moaning people complaining about spam anyway!
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Yes I have heard good things from Messagelabs not, used them before myself though. I think Exchange 2010 we will be sticking with ironport + forefront (currently using antigen)
 
Bry said:
Yea , I just don't understand what they fill it up with. 30GB thats just nuts and could be cut down a lot i would hope
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Checked, our largest mailbox is 32398 MB!

Bry said:
Perfectly agree. I just sat my 60-662 (Exchange 2010) and passed with 980 so ready for our migration now. I still don't see us increasing mailbox size limits but then we got a couple of months to start planning it so we shall see
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Taking my exam soon for that one, meant to take it this Monday but didn't realise it was actually last thursday so I missed it! the date on the confirmation email was in US date format so I must have glanced over it. booked my calendar for a reminder each day for like a week in advance this time for the next one lol.

2GB mailbox limits in 2007 is a step in the right direction, these days 100MB mailboxes really aren't large enough for most users imo, computers are quicker, internet lines are faster, people like to store more data.

Bry said:
Yes I have heard good things from Messagelabs not, used them before myself though. I think Exchange 2010 we will be sticking with ironport + forefront (currently using antigen)
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We use ForeFront as well on our servers, it adds an additional layer of protection but we only use it for scanning for viruses not for blocking spam. Message Labs will protect you against viruses for internet mail but for now interorg mail traffic so it makes sense to me to use it anyway.
 
Microsoft's Office365 is due to move from beta to production in a months time, it has a 25GB mailbox limit. I'd be surprised if you found a hosted service that charged less than them (£6.50/user/month).

I'm on the beta, and think I'm sold on it :)
 
Eulogy said:
Taking my exam soon for that one, meant to take it this Monday but didn't realise it was actually last thursday so I missed it! the date on the confirmation email was in US date format so I must have glanced over it. booked my calendar for a reminder each day for like a week in advance this time for the next one lol.
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Got to admit I can see how you made that mistake the prometric site is very confusing.
The exam does cover a fair bit of power shell but for most of its just knowing what specific command does what. I think I only had 2 questions that required knowing the full syntax. It has also been updated for exchange 2010 SP1 so you need to know whats been updated/change/added


One thing we did have last year was some database corruption. I cant go into why but we had to end up doing ese repairs and isinteg fixes. This took the better part of a day per database and as stated our mailboxes are tiny compared to yours. I would hate to need to try and fix databases holding mailboxes of 32GB :(
 
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I love the powershell stuff, I used to like writing VBScripts for things, but PowerShell is like VBS but better! :)

If one of our databases corrupted then we'd have to probably restore from backup in a dial tone scenario, I can't see us being able to easily repair large databases either.

Saying that we do try and limit the databases sizes where we can, so we do our best to keep on top of the databases sizes to ensure they don't grow too large.

I wrote a powershell script to return various stats from all of our Exchange 07 servers (number of users, EBD file size, whitespace, whitespace %, average mailbox size, last full backup date etc). Then I added these stats into our internal monitoring website so that we can get stats at a glance from every server and see how they're doing :)

I believe recommendations are that for Non CCR clusters you limit DB sizes to 100GB, for CCR 200GB, if that 32GB user is on a SCC cluster then he's already taking up 32% of the recommended database size alone!
 
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Bry said:
one thing I feels that lets them down as they only run spam assassin and don't use any hardware solutions like barracuda or ironport. As such I do tend to get a lot of spam and I am thinking of changing.
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If you're getting spam, contact them and they'll assist - Exchange has a range of settings from "tag everything" to "be reasonably sensible" - spam assassin is pretty much the standard in spam filtering :)
 
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