[JDEV] Jabber Advocacy - help required

[Michael Brown]

I have been contacting some webhosting ISP's to see if they would consider
offering a Jabber server to their customers in the same way they currently
offer mail and news servers etc.  See below the reply from dreamhost.com:

>Hello Michael,
>
>Thanks for contacting us. At the current time, we do not have plans to
>offer Jabber to our customers. Chat clients are extremely CPU intensive
>and we find that they put a great deal of strain on the servers we
>designate for our shared hosting customers.
>
>I'm sorry I couldn't give you the answer you were looking for. If you do
>have other questions, please let us know and we'll get back to you as
>soon as possible.

Since I have never run a server, I can't really argue against this, except
perhaps to point out that Jabber clients run on the users local machine.
Can someone give me some stats, or figures that compare the CPU (and other
resource requirements) of a Jabber server to, say, a POP3 server?  Also the
number of current connections per machine etc would be useful.  If there was
a website that showed this sort of information that I could send a link
directly to that would be even better.

While I am on this subject, can someone tell me if there is a way a ISP can
set up their Jabber server so that it is possible for each customers JID and
email address to be the same?  I understand that you can use MX records to
route messages from user at mydomain.com to user12345 at ispdomain.com, but from
the client perspective, if they user tries to log in as user at mydomain.com,
how does the login get redirected to the ISP's Jabber server?

Thanks,

Michael.