php mail function for sending sms is slow sometimes

[wolfie1]

Hello,

I'm using php's mail function to send sms messages to my sprint phone.  Sometimes I receive the text right away and other times it comes in as much as an hour or so later.  My server is on GoDaddy.  Does anyone have any ideas about what could be causing the bottleneck?  To debug this I tried sending sms messages from my comcast email.  So far those are always received very quickly.  Perhaps the issue is on the GoDaddy server... I might try contacting them.

 

By the way, it seems like the first text I send is received quickly, but then if I send other text messages within some short time frame, those don't always show up immediately.

 

Has anyone else experienced anything similar?

[schilly]

I haven't done any SMS sending but I've never had a good experience with GoDaddy and would not recommend them at all.

[wolfie1]

Who do you recommend using?

[Pikachu2000]

I've not had a bad experience with GoDaddy, per se, but there are certain things about them that are annoying. One of those things is when using their formmail, it queues up all emails, and batch sends them every 15(?) minutes. That should explain the delays you're experiencing.

[schilly]

I use dreamhost which is just shared hosting like godaddy but i haven't had any issues with them. i know some people probably have. it really depends on how much resources you need. i'm not hosting any sites with serious traffic so it works for me and it's good for testing.

 

The last project I did with GoDaddy, my ftp connection would time out all the time. Their DNS Preview feature broke all my jquery so I couldn't use it. I couldn't stand working on that site because of GoDaddy.

[Hypnos]

When email servers get overloaded they queue emails to be processed at a later time to even out the load. Wouldn't doubt for a second that this is what's happening.

 

You don't have to use their email server. If you aren't sending too many emails/SMSes per day just use Swift Mailer pointed to a Gmail account.

[wolfie1]

Thanks.  A major function of the website is to send text alerts.  I'm doing this via php's mail function at the moment.  If the website does well, I could imagine sending thousands, possibly tens of thousands of texts per day.  Any advice is appreciated.

 

I've not thought about this too much yet, but I could generate an xml file on the GoDaddy server and have "something else" poll that xml file and send text alerts based on updates in that file.  Not sure what the "something else" would be yet....