Survey Results from Parallels Summit 2009

For those who attended Parallels Summit 2009 in Las Vegas way back in February, you probably witnessed our shameless giveaway of NERF guns in exchange for survey responses. Here’s some interesting statistics to share.

77 surveys were collected in-person at the MailChannels booth. 88% specialize in Servers and Software; 40% were executives.

• When asked how respondents defined spam, the majority chose “any email they did not request,” the next popular answers were “email that violates the CAN-SPAM Act,” and “email promoting stocks, pills, etc.”
• 56% use open source software like SpamAssassin to stop spam, followed by commercial appliances (e.g. Barracuda), and then commercial software (e.g. PureMessage).
• The two biggest challenges to hosting email are lowering infrastructure costs and clean inboxes. 36% said they used more than 51 servers to provide mail service. When asked how often spam affected the availability of their email services, 38.1% said a few times a year, 28.6% said monthly, and 19% said weekly.
• 33.3% said their anti-spam system was a work in progress, while 42.9% said they were looking at new solutions.

The top three solutions respondents believe will improve performance of their mail system:
1) Spam pre-filtering
2) More filtering appliances
3) Restricting bandwidth to spammers

• 30.1% of respondents said that they could save $100K or more per year if they could reduce the number of mail servers and filtering appliances by 80%.
• Resources where people learn about tech are Web Hosting Talk (61.1%) and theWHIR (44.4%).

Conducted bi-annually at HostingCon and Parallels Summit, this survey presents information concerning the trends and perceptions of web hosting professionals. For more information about the survey please don’t hesitate to contact us.