Recently I was asked if I could provide a reference for my hosting company, ORCS Web. After responding, I thought it would be worth spreading the love a little via my blog as well. So, now that I’m somewhat recovered from the holidays, here goes. The questions below were asked by a potential customer – the answers are mine and refer to my personal experience with ORCS Web.

We are looking at moving our POP3 mailboxes/system over to ORCS and wanted to get your feedback. Below are a few questions I have and would appreciate your response.

Also I checked out your site and it looks great. I love reading new tutorials and learning new stuff. I will spread the word.

Thx

-N-

How do you rate the overall email service (assuming your using POP3 mail accounts)?

I have 50-100 POP3 accounts for about 5 different domains. They’re easy to manage and pretty much “just work”. At one point there was a fair amount of spam coming to my accounts (through no fault of ORCS – the emails were published on the internet), but upgrades in their server side spam filtering (the biggest one back in 2005 I believe) have dramatically improved this (though a client-side spam filter is still a requirement, at least for me).

How many users/accounts do you actively have?

I’d say between 50-100. My own organization uses only a couple dozen actively, but there are a bunch I maintain that were created for authors and partners over the last 10 years.

What services do you use that ORCS offers?

I have several dedicated servers (both web and database), I have an installation of Lyris for mailing lists, and I have two shared accounts on their web farm. They handle all of my email and web serving needs.

How long have you been a client?

Since 1999 IIRC. A very long time.

Do you know anyone else that uses ORCS?

Yes, many. I’ve recommended several of their current clients to them and none have regretted the decision (that they’ve told me, anyway). They host some major sites for Microsoft, including www.asp.net and weblogs.asp.net and blogs.msdn.com.

How do you rate ORCS for overall reliability?

Excellent. When things break, which isn’t terribly often, 95% of the time it’s my fault. And even then, they’re usually right on it to get things fixed.

We are definitely using ORCS for our website hosting (two sites) but our email system is something were taking the time to look over since our last host for that has not been very good.

I don’t have a ton to say about their email services since I’m a web developer so most of my weird issues relate to web server configuration and such. That said, I don’t spend much time on the email side of things because it “just works” so I don’t have to, so that’s at least some endorsement for you.