Sending SMS Messages from your web server

Sending SMS messages from your web server seems like something that’s relatively simple. It is, but what I found was that there are a lot of services that offer this, but for a fee. The fee structure is usually per message. Just do a Yahoo search on “SMS Gateway” and you’ll come across a ton of these.

Going with a paid service might be a good option for you, but there are other options. Almost all carriers provide an Email-to-SMS gateway, and they’re free. Therefore, the other option is to programmatically determine which email address domain to use based on the carrier for the phone number you’re interested in sending the SMS to.

There might be some restrictions on how frequent you can send messages, but I haven’t hit any limitations yet.

Here’s a list of carriers and the email addresses your web server can send an email to in order to send an SMS message to their customers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_gateways#Email_to_SMS_.2F_Web_to_SMS