I have had Optimum Online Boost for a few days. It’s not bad and here is what they offer (from the website):
- Faster speed, up to 30 Mbps down and up to Mbps up.
- Total of 15 e-mail addresses, 1GB each.
- Different setup’s for creating web sites.
- Domain registration.
- Web hosting.
- 15 custom e-mail addresses (some.joe@yourdomain.com).
- The ability to host your own web server or e-mail server.
The last one grabbed me and you can un-block ports 25 and 80 (SMTP and HTTP). The rest is probably not bad; I just don’t really have much use for items 2 through 6 myself. If I were doing the home business thing that might work for me.
The speed is great but at some point we hit “ludicrous speed”. The servers I am downloading from aren’t that well connected so no “light speed is to slow” for me.
There is a catch: the IP address is dynamically assigned. Static IP addresses are not yet offered. For hosting a server this is not really a problem since they offer different dynamic DNS clients for Linux and for Windows.
For sending e-mail from your domain, this might be an issue. My current address is 24.46.186.255. If you check my address in Multi-RBL you can see that that IP address is on a ban list of both njabl.org and sorbs.net, so anyone I send mail to who subscribes will not accept mail from a server in my basement.
I used to use SORBS, now I use Spamhaus, they seem to have a more accurate hit rate for me. The dynamic address is not a show stopper since I use another server I maintain to deliver my e-mail.
Still having a static IP address would be more attractive. I have spoken with the tech support at Optimum Online about this, they don’t offer it but are contemplating doing so in the future.