Hi, I have an online forum and I need to install a PC to Mobile SMS service on it. What is the best and cheapest SMS service provider? I also have a question about SMS Service API. Does having an SMS API access mean I can send as many SMS messages as I want or what does it exactly mean? Thanks in advance
I am not sure about the cheapest, one of the popular web based SMS provider is clickatell. You may checkout their prices and coverage for your country. From my personal experience, all web based SMS providers are unreliable. Sometimes messages gets lost, without any explanation. It also depends on the country and network, so my experience need not be same for everyone. But it is true that SMS originating from web is given much lesser priority than SMS from a mobile phone. API is simply a set of rules to communicate with a service. In this case API will tell you how to connect to the SMS server and how to send the SMS. If you have the API, you can create a script (in PHP or something) so that you can send the SMS as you wish. Ofcourse you need to buy credits as well. There is also a possibility of allowing to send free SMS, using the email to SMS functionality some providers support. This is again operator specific and not much data is openly available. There are some cheap scripts to do the same, you may checkout if interested.