US Cable Support > Comcast HSI > [Rant] I feel for the 50/10 biz folks

[Rant] I feel for the 50/10 biz folks

I know several 50/10 business subscribers (actual businesses, not residential torrent aficionados) and I know for a fact that the bill is of no concern to them.

reply to pflog
Yea, I've had 50/10 since '09, same price, same speed... I've seen just about every other package get a speed increase... except ours... come on Comcast... Also, why the heck does 100/20 business cost $600/month? That seems a bit high....
--
TorDek: "DSLR... Here, were not just experts... were also vindictive bastards..."

Ditto...

What makes it even more painful is that they got rid of residential caps (for now), and doubled the speed. I could have residential 100/20 for less than my 50/10...But I need port 25 - Although colocating my port 25 needs somewhere else and trying to get out of my business contract is starting to look attractive...

Just a thought, I recently went through this runaround with their tech support people and had the port 25 block temporarily removed... Curious to see how long it lasts for honestly.

Anyway, you could get an offsite host that offers email and then use it as an upstream relay for yourself. You relay mail into it over 465 or 587 and it will deal with getting it where it needs to go. Basically you take your SMTP server and set your upstream provider as the smarthost, not a difficult configuration to setup and it should achieve what you're looking for.

I used it for testing so I just SSH into one of my hosts and telnet to port 25 until I'm content...

My problem is the other way around - I smarthost to Comcast's SMTP now because I don't have a static IP, but for incoming mail, there is no other way..

I wish someone had a simple port redirector service that was cheap, but all the ones I have found want to charge by the domain name/number of emails/etc.

I'm not doing anything for now, mostly to see if they decide to reinstate caps, as I do go through a lot of data...If they don't, I might just move my email hosting to some other server.

Colocation is so cheap now - unmetered 100Mbps for $59, as an example: »fdcservers.net/server_colocation.php

Even better, their Denver data center jumps straight onto Comcast:
1 67.176.66.1 (67.176.66.1) 18.593 ms 18.577 ms 28.566 ms
2 te-9-6-ur01.englewood.co.denver.comcast.net (68.86.129.161) 11.320 ms 11.345 ms 11.813 ms
3 te-0-2-0-6-ar02.denver.co.denver.comcast.net (68.86.179.185) 13.596 ms 13.615 ms 13.605 ms
4 pos-0-7-0-0-ar02.aurora.co.denver.comcast.net (68.86.128.246) 12.194 ms 12.237 ms 12.562 ms
5 he-3-9-0-0-cr01.denver.co.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.92.21) 13.405 ms 13.441 ms 13.429 ms
6 te3-5.ccr01.den03.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.10.33) 11.645 ms 12.982 ms 12.962 ms
7 te0-1-0-3.ccr22.den01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.83.33) 12.554 ms te0-1-0-3.ccr21.den01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.83.29) 12.517 ms 13.417 ms
8 38.88.52.2 (38.88.52.2) 13.421 ms 38.122.114.26 (38.122.114.26) 13.041 ms 12.108 ms
9 mirrordenver.fdcservers.net (76.73.4.58) 11.859 ms 11.887 ms 11.885 ms

I pay $40/mo just in electricity...Having it all local is cool, but...

Oh, and based on my experience with residential port 25 blocks from before I went to BC, it won't last if you are actually doing anything on port 25 with any amount of volume. I wasn't spamming and they still blocked it because of the amount of incoming port 25 traffic I had..Went through the block/unblock thing about 4 times before I gave up. The blocking (as I understand it, when it was called TP25) is an automated process too..

Depending on what else the server is doing, another option to look in to would be a VPS. The smallest VPS offering from a provider (such as Linode) would easily handle a mail server and/or perform port redirection.

Exactly my other thought!! - I have lots of thoughts about this

Either moving the email side entirely or having the port redirect on that VPS would easily work. It doesn't take much CPU/BW/anything...

reply to pflog
There has been no increase in price for our 50/10 for business.
Granted were a non-profit and Comcast writes off a huge chunk on their taxes each year.

The only increase I saw is we went from a block of 5 ips at $5.00 a month to 10 ips for $15.00 a month.. again an acceptable increase.

reply to n0xlf
DynDNS is pretty good with their services. I haven't used their gateway (use their DNS hosting), but I'm sure it is good and it is unlimited.

»dyn.com/email/dyn-email-gateway/

$50 per domain name, so that falls under my comment of:

"I wish someone had a simple port redirector service that was cheap, but all the ones I have found want to charge by the domain name/number of emails/etc."

Bummer...

reply to pflog

reply to pflog
dnsexit does what you want for 25 bucks a year per domain. Got mine going to port 26

»www.dnsexit.com/Direct.sv?cmd=mailRedirect

I figured out a solution for this. I'll give some details in case someone runs into this on a search.

-Start an free Amazon EC2 instance and provision an elastic IP on it.

-Fill out this form: »aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/htm···-request
(they even give you RDNS - How cool is that?)

-Install socat and run something like "socat TCP-LISTEN:25,fork TCP:mail.yourserver.net:26" This can also be done with redir or iptables, but socat works nicely. This is a simple port redirect, not a store/forward.

With this you can have unlimited emails/domains for next to nothing - Simply point the MX record of a particular domain to the EC2 instance.

Don't forget to add the elastic IP to your internal/trusted networks on Spamassassin if you are doing your own spam filtering, otherwise it sees all of the source IPs as your EC2 instance and not where the mail actually came from.

Anyway, testing this now, but so far so good...Amazon charges for BW (I think $0.10/GB after the first GB), but the CPU usage should be next to nothing, so it probably won't ever go above their free tier.

Keep in mind that Amazon's free tier only lasts for a year. After that micro instances are around $16 a month I think.

I don't want to advertise for another board or specific providers, but there are many VPS providers out there that can provide an instance to forward that low amount of traffic at a dramatically lower cost. Catching an advertised sale price, you can find a 256 MB instance w/ 500 GB a month traffic for $12-$24 per year in the US.

Amazon's billing is a bit cryptic, but I think it's going to be close to free - They bill by CPU usage over a certain threshold, so an instance like this may cost next to nothing...I'll keep an eye on the billing and see if I can get some more hard data on what it will cost..

In any case, Amazon aside, it's just nice to know that it can be done easily...