Hi Russell, On 23 Sep. 2017 4:45 pm, "Russell Coker" <russell@coker.com.au> wrote: On Saturday, 23 September 2017 4:56:54 AM AEST Wen Lin via luv-main wrote:

For VPS hosting service - I had looked at one hostwinds.com (Editor's Choice of au.pcmag.com 2017) (~ US$ 14 / mth). Will check out others to compare - basically I'm after a reasonably priced and reputable VPS web hosting company. I would like to hear any recommendation, or any first-hand experience dealing with any particular web hosting company - which I'm sure many of LUV members certainly have.

https://www.linode.com/pricing To just send out mail you don't need much from a hosting company. I've found Linode to be very good and they have services starting at $5 per month that will do what you want. 1G of RAM should be enough for sending mail. https://www.scaleway.com/ Scaleway starts at E2.99 per month and has 2G of RAM.

For domain name (.org.au) - About $48 for 2 years. Any reputable Domain Registrar that you would recommend?

I will check out the above 2 web hosting companies you had introduced. There are cheaper domains available, like .click. They already got a .org.au domain registered some time ago. So I just need to find out where they had registered it, and then help renew it when it's about to expire. BTW, I thought I could use whois to find out the expiry date of this domain, but I noticed that the registrars in Australia (for the .au) seem to hide this date from the world. Apparently in Australia, the only way to find out this info is to contact the registrar directly. Whereas for some of the non-".au" domains, I could see the registration expiry date being displayed. May be it's some sort of security measure in Australia.

"*What a commercial mailing list operator does, and which you cannot easily replicate, is build and maintain a reputation as a responsible and reputable source of bulk email. If you are not going to be getting into that, perhaps you could benefit from getting help from a commercial mailer. ... *

Don't send spam and don't use an IP address from a spam-friendly ISP and you should be OK. Very true.

I also read somewhere which seemed to point to a 3rd option: Still use own mail server, but direct the outbound mails to an external Mail Relay service. What do you think?

There's no point in that. Either run your own server or use an external company. Thanks Russell for your input and advice. Cheers, Wen -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/