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Have you ever received junk mail (spam)? Of course you have and so has everyone else in the world. Do you love it? Do you like getting letters from someone selling watches one minute, health insurance and Viagra the next? (and yes, all three letters came from the same person - they just used different email addresses). How about the one where you have been personally selected to receive the personal fortune of the former queen of Nigeria? Love spam? Nope? AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Comcast and all the other companies who provide email services know that you, I and everyone else are sick of spam. And so they try to come up with creative ways to block it. Five years ago they would block an individual email address for being a known spammer. So Joe@TheSpamMan.com just changed his email address to Joe1@TheSpamMan.com. Three years ago they started blocking all email addresses that came from a domain name. So when they started blocking all emails from _____@TheSpamMan.com Joe (and all the other spammers) simply created additional domain names on their computers. So for instance Joe229@TheSpamMan.com become JoesMama@SpamForAll.com. A year or so ago all the BIG EMAIL COMPANIES got the brilliant idea to simply block all the emails that came from a computer which was known to send out spam. There is only one problem with their approach. Most computers (servers) where spam comes from have a thousand or more websites (and matching email domains) on them. In reality it was not the computer itself that the BIG EMAIL COMPANIES blocked but the Internet Address of the computer (Referred to as IP Address). So if for instance Comcast's email system saw spam coming from Joe@SpamFactory.com they would block the IP Address that Joe's email came from. The problem (for other people who were sharing that server and IP Address) was that Comcast was now blocking their emails as Spam too. Maybe a few days later AOL would start blocking that email address. Then BellSouth and all the rest. And so over a thousand people on that server had their outgoing (and reply) emails blocked as spam "without their knowledge". And so, a thousand business owners were replying to emails from potential customers and now their outgoing emails were being blocked as spam. That meant that Joe's one batch of spam caused over 1,000 businesses to have reduced sales (and profits). Joe just cost a lot of people money, possibly even a job or two. But did Joe care? Nope! Joe just switched companies (email servers) and started sending out spam again the next day. Do you want to be a victim of all the Joe's (spammers) out there or do you want to do something to protect your business? | ||
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You've all seen IP Addresses before. However, you may not have know what they looked at. An IP address is simply a series of numbers and dots that designates an address on the Internet. For instance Google.com is a website address. But Google also has an IP Address which is . The sites IP Address is: 74.125.77.147 . If you were to type this address into the address bar of your browser you would see Google's website. | ||
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If you are hosting your website and/or email on someone else's (hosting company) computer then there is a 99% probability that the server is using what is called a Shared IP Address. Basically this means that if one person does something wrong (Sends spam, has a transmittable virus or Trojan) everyone on that server (you) can get blamed and banned as if you had each sent out spam on your own. So basically, having a Shared IP Address is bad idea. | ||
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The opposite of a Shared IP Address is a Unique IP Address. A Unique IP Address (Such as the one for Google above) means that you are not sharing your IP Address with anyone else. It belongs to your website and your website alone. If you have a Unique IP Address you can be on a server with a thousand other websites and even if they all become Joe's (Spammers) nothing bad happens to you. The BIG EMAIL COMPANIES may block all of them and yet your email still goes through just fine. One other point. Websites with a Unique IP Address tend to rank much better. (Shhh... Please do not tell our competition as 99% of them are still using Shared IP Addresses). | ||
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About $5 a month But... Please... Don't Tell Joe... (And Don't Be A Joe!) | ||
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