Hello phpList community,
We are currently hosting our website (antisplataero.com) with SiteGround (GrowBig plan) and using their SMTP server for all outgoing email, including both customer order confirmations and newsletter campaigns through phpList.
Here’s our situation:
- SiteGround’s policy is 400 emails per hour, max 40 different recipients per hour.
- We always stay within these limits, typically sending around 300 emails per hour.
- The problem is that whenever a customer places an order on our website, the order confirmation email seems to “restart” the hourly counter. This causes the server to hit overload, block further emails, and render SMTP unusable.
- As a result, order confirmation emails don’t get delivered, and phpList campaigns also fail.
- Even after more than an hour, the SMTP sometimes remains locked, which makes us think there may be a reset issue or stuck mail queue.
SiteGround’s support told us there’s no way to adjust these limits other than:
- Upgrading to Cloud hosting at $100/month (not feasible for us), or
- Moving email to a dedicated provider like Google Workspace.
The whole point of using phpList for us was to mitigate costs while maintaining direct control of our campaigns. We are not a big operation and cannot justify enterprise-level costs. We have about 5,500 subscribers in our list and would like to send out 3–4 newsletters per month, plus transactional emails for customer orders.
My questions to the community:
- Which SMTP providers would you recommend that integrate well with phpList?
- We need to handle both transactional emails (order confirmations) and campaign emails without constant rate limit problems.
- Cost-effectiveness is critical — we’re looking for something reliable but still budget-friendly, since our subscriber base is relatively small.
Any recommendations, experiences, or guidance would be greatly appreciated!
Best regards,
Niles