Lithium Hosting, based in Iowa, operates on the simple concept that good web hosting shouldn’t be expensive. The company functions as a small, lean, agile organization to minimize overhead and offer quality service at a low price.
Customers of Lithium Hosting range from individuals to medium-sized businesses worldwide. Owner Troy Siedsma says the company does not actively advertise its services. “Our growth is 100 percent organic, based on customer referrals and word-of-mouth,” he says.
Lithium Hosting has always actively monitored its IP reputation to be proactive about blocklisting and handle spam issues before customer emails are impacted. But it can take two or three days to have an IP de-listed from blocklists. During that time, customers cannot send email to certain recipients.
“Our problems with blocklisting led to angry customers, and for good reason,” says Troy Siedsma, owner of Lithium Hosting.
The company was sending email direct to the Internet from its shared hosting servers, which resulted in frequent blocklisting and a negative IP reputation. Customer email traffic would come to a halt, triggering a spike in complaints and support tickets.
Resolving those issues took work hours that Troy knew were better spent supporting customers and infrastructure.
Lithium Hosting wanted a way to stop spam from leaving its servers and at the same time, identify the spam source so they could actually resolve the issues, instead of just de-listing and fixing the IP reputation.
“We now have zero blocklisting or IP reputation issues due to spam, which means more time is being dedicated to customer support and improving our services”
Troy says the company researched and tested a few different solutions before choosing MailChannels Outbound Filtering . “It was the only one that seemed designed to address the issues we were trying to resolve and fix,” he says.
He adds that setting up MailChannels on Lithium Hosting’s servers was easy and the solution integrates well in its network environment.
With MailChannels Outbound Filtering in place, Lithium Hosting is able to provide reliable email service to customers because the threat of blocklisting and bad IP reputations has been removed.
“It’s a value-added-service we provide to our customers so they don’t have to worry about email delivery issues,” Troy says.
He adds that since integrating MailChannels Outbound Filtering on Lithium Hosting’s shared hosting servers, support tickets related to blocklisting and outbound spam have been reduced to nil.
“We now have zero blocklisting or IP reputation issues due to spam, which means more time is being dedicated to customer support and improving our services,” Troy says.
“By removing the threat of blocklisted IPs and outgoing spam, MailChannels Outbound Filtering allows us to devote that time to growing the business and supporting customers. We’re happy to focus on what’s important and leave outgoing spam in the rearview.”