Sorry Godaddy, the last straw for virtual dedicated server with a Plesk Control panel.
About six months ago I started receiving the following email message.
*****************
YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DAILY SMTP RELAY LIMIT
*****************Dear James,
You have reached your current SMTP relay limit of 1000 per day on the following hosting account:
Hosting Services
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Your hosting server will be unable to send email until the daily SMTP relay limit is reset. The daily SMTP relay limit is reset on all accounts at midnight MST.
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If you need to send more than 1000 emails per day from your hosting server, you can request an increase through Customer Support. However, increase requests must be justified and must not violate our anti-spam policy.
If you have any questions, please contact Customer Support:
+ Online Support: https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/
support.asp?prog_id=GoDaddy&isc;=gdbb727
+ Email: support@godaddy.com
+ Phone: (480) 505-8877Thanks again for being a GoDaddy.com Hosting customer.
Sincerely,
GoDaddy.com
I followed all the procedures per Godaddy recommendations for preventing unauthorized use of my email servers from sending spam from others. Made sure my email relays were closed. Made sure I did not have any catchall email accounts. This however did not stop the problem and the incoming messages from Godaddy. I sent an email to Godaddy, but was surprised to find out that this was going to be a $75.00 charge for trouble shooting the problem, with no guarantee that it would be fixed. Not good enough for me. After doing a search online, I saw that others were experiencing the same exact problem related to Godaddy virtual dedicated hosting. So, sorry Godaddy, love your domain name registration, but virtual dedicated hosting with Plesk control panel leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, I had other complaints with the Plesk control panel. Future reference, go with a Cpanel over Plesk. Cpanel control panel offers a lot more options to make your web life a lot easier from a webmaster point of view.
So, I moved on to a new hosting company. That will be a future article.
By-the-way, my suspicion of the problem with the Godaddy Virtual Dedicated server account is to do with something called email dictionary attacks. What spammers are doing is inundating in a matter of seconds, a dictionary attack to try to find other emails on a particular domain name. I believe they are using a form gateway to get into the server, however briefly, and launch the dictionary attack. This causes the SMTP gateway to get flagged for the Godaddy account. At that point, you have no recourse than to wait it out till midnight for Godaddy to automatically reset the SMTP email relay gateway, so you can then send and receive emails.