First off I've been mailing GI off and on for the past 9 years, full time for the past two. As the title suggests, I'm wondering how long mailers keep their servers online before either 1. ruining the IPs so bad they are worthless to mail on, or 2. getting shut down by your host. I realize there are many factors here such as the host's complaint tolerance, where the host is, how good the network is in the first place, data cleanliness, etc. I re-clean twice a month but inevitably still piss some people off with too much mail, hit new spam traps, etc. I remove all complaints including DNEs from affiliate networks. I've kept a list with notes of all the hosts I've used in the past year. Some are complaint tolerant, some turned off the server with the first one (just happened again today - had the server since December, got my first complaint ticket and they shut me off -first time using this particular host). In the past year I've gone through 28 servers of which 7 are currently still online. I've had some as long as 8 months and others as short as 1 month. The longer I've had them does not necessarily mean they are the best servers, only that the hosts care less about complaints. I had two servers online for 8 months that were some of the best I ever had. However, I have one online still that is pretty much crap but since they let me send all I want, it has been up for almost 7 months. So, what is your experience.... How long do you last with your hosts? Is there a good time to churn and burn?
Sounds like you're suffering the same fate of every mailer who attempted to mail using crappy 3rd party data? What kind of spam traps are you hitting?
Well you do burn your IP's faster with GI mailing mainly because you're dealing with the complaints coming from 1000's of hosts. I would consider yourself lucky with that amount of servers.
Only 20% of my data is from some of my own offers that were running up until a little over a year ago. The rest is from a trusted partner that has some feeds that are scrubbed and then we clean it all up twice a month. Don't have the luxury of 1st party data right now as my offers are all dried up. I've hit spamcop a few times here and there, barracuda, etc. Haven't been haus'ed in 1 1/2 years (snowshoe problem). I get complaints from a variety of sources, including AOL this month (have a few thousand on my click list). I got one complaint on a server that I had up for 3 months this week and the host shut me down. Others are more tolerant and I even have some offshore boxes that don't care at all (of course those are the worst as they seem to attract mailers with no concern for spam either). I carefully hit my click list while the IPs are good, then add the opens, then open the gates to the whole list. No, never bought a crappy CD of scraped garbage from eBay. Mail pretty clean.
'trusted partner that has some feeds that are scrubbed and we clean it all up twice a month' could mean many things... If your data is truly good, you might find the low and slow method works well for GI. This seems to only work very rarely, but when it does, life is good I used to keep all my servers indefinitely, if you let them rest, rotate around the data you send maybe on a monthly basis, you might find good results from something like that. Though its good procedure to keep the same data mailing from the same server for quarantine reasons, I find that rotating occasionally gives you a fresh set of domains/addresses to mail that might get through where you have been blocked/filtered if mailing the same stuff every day.
