Re-Post

[zarduzi]

This is a repost trying to find the right place

Hey guys,

I asked John Thursday in class about a server problem. Sorry John, this is the only way I know to contact you because I forgot what you told me. Anyway, my problem is not very long but I will have to explain in some detail.

My fiancee's mother owns a wholesale jewelry store in Atlanta and last year she decided to launch a website to help sell her goods. She contacted another guy who has done other wholesale jewelry websites for other people she knows or is in Atlanta area. He charged her $3000-$5000 to design her website, and now it's $300 a month for a dedicated server that we pay. So the website was launched sometime in March of '08. I was still in Savannah going to Armstrong, so I had nothing to do with any of this. When I moved up here in the summer to move in with her, her Mother hired me about august of '08 to mainly take pictures and put them on the website. So as I gradually got better with photoshop and with taking pictures I actually started to care about the website since I am the one who does everything for it, from taking pictures to writing descriptions of said jewelry(I know nothing of jewelry). So know you know the backstory, now for the twist.

I started taking adderall again this year to help out with school, so I really concentrate on things(look at this email). First, I questioned the website building fee. Now, $3000-$5000 for a great website is a fair price, keyword here is "great". Last semester in 1300 when we were doing web page design, Prof. Benson told us not to even think about turning it in if you didn't check to see if it compiled correctly in IE, Firefox, Safari and every other web browser available. Well, nobody told this guy to check if it will look correct in Firefox, my browser of choice, so it looks like shit in Firefox and decent, keyword "decent", in IE. Well, no big deal right. Websites aren't supposed to look great anyway, right guys? Now, I have figured out that the websites that this "programmer" has built all have the same layout and design with a few minor changes ie. color, name, some tags/buttons but at least their sites don't look this bad in firefox. They paid this person a great deal of money for minor changes he probably did in 1 hour. Win.

We use a program for our shopping cart that is essentially our entire site. Yes, the other websites mentioned use the exact same program. This program is great, it has everything you would need to run any kind of e-commerce you can think of, it is perfect. So the programmer, to save time and strain from typing 10 letters, I will just refer to him as "asshole", just 3 less. Like I was saying, asshole decides to change the program a little but only just enough to keep me from contacting the creators of the product to help with troubleshooting issues. Apparently, you can't alter their program or they can't help you. So here we are with a mediocre website and less-than mediocre shopping cart software that could have been perfect and a $300 a month bill for a dedicated server.

Now before jump the gun on my best friend, let me give you the specs of our server.
Core 2 Duo 2.13
Windows Server 2008 Web Edition
300 GB of Bandwidth a month
a single 120 gig hd
2 gigs of ram
MS SQL Server 2005 Standard edition
And apparently 24 hour support

The MS SQL program is because the shopping cart has issues with MySQL and works fantastic on MS SQL, the creators strongly recommend MS SQL. Before you jump the gun on my second best friend(me), I need to tell you that I was not involved in anyway with the creation, brainstorming, or thought process that went into this server/website creation. This was done without me. After shopping around from the Dedicated server above we are actually getting a pretty good price, only because MS SQL Server 2005 Standard edition is crazy expensive.

After knowing all of the information above this is the last part(almost there!) before my thought provoking question. We send out a newsletter to some 750+ customers, a combination of online customers and in-store customers. Now to send out this many emails from a regular email account would be impossible, the limit is somewhere of 200 to 300 emails a day, 300 tops. So you would need a System SMTP on a dedicated or shared server to handle this amount of emails at once. Now sometimes we get a failure notice which just means that the email wasn't able to be sent. So here it is, the big question:

When I open the emails, I use outlook express(for simplicity), I checked a failure notice last week and looked at the message source which apparently tells you everything about an email so you can troubleshoot as to why there was a failure. There is a couple of lines in here that strike me. If I have sent these newsletters using our "dedicated server" why would another website that the asshole has created, show up in the message source. Now if you guys can't understand what I'm trying to say,

asshole creates WebsiteA & WebsiteB & WebsiteC
We are WebsiteC
We are on a dedicated server
WebsiteC sends out newsletters
WebsiteC gets a "failure to deliver" notice from newsletter
WebsiteC looks at "failure to deliver" notice's message source
Message source reads something like:

recieved from [ip address] (helo=WebsiteA.com)
(envelope-from <emailaddress@WebsiteC.com)
Received: from mail pickup service by WebsiteA.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC;

Remember this came from WebsiteC
WebsiteC confused.

Now Question: Is this a dedicated server or not. How would I check to see If it is or not(no access to physical server)? John? Prof. Benson? Anyone?

[adminjulia]

See reply in Hardware. This looks like a combination problem.