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I meant their regular service. $5 per account is completely unreasonable, I don't understand where the money goes. (I talk about the $5 plan because it's the sa

I meant their regular service. $5 per account is completely unreasonable, I don't understand where the money goes. (I talk about the $5 plan because it's the same as the $3 plan, but you can use your own domain, which doesn't really make it more complicated for them to give you service or anything)

tcfunk 9y ago
You'd be hard-pressed to find a VPS to rent and host your own email server for much less than $5/mo. And that's just an empty server! Now you've gotta set up the email software and hope to god people get your emails since they aren't coming from a reputable source.
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  You can get a Scaleways machine for €2.99 a month which will handle a reasonable volume of email. BUT. The ongoing faff and arsing about and maintenance isn't fun. If I didn't have many, many accounts for me and other people on my servers, I'd have migrated to FastMail a long time ago.
  - tcfunk 9y ago
    Never heard of Scaleway...those prices seem to beat the pants of DigitalOcean. Might have to look into that, thank you for mentioning.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      They (Scaleway) are ARM machines, no?
      - cknight 9y ago
        Depends which offer you are looking at. They also have x86 VPS options using Atom chips.
      - zimpenfish 9y ago
        You can still run mail servers on them though. You might have to compile stuff up for yourself if your distro doesn't support it but I've found Arch to be pretty good in this respect.
        cyberpunk 9y ago
        That's all fine, but then you're one hardware failure away from not being able to receive email. I'm working on a guide on how to setup a replicated fault tolerant email cluster (galera/dsync) here [1] -- feedback appreciated. This costs far more than something like fastmail, however. Depending on your situation you might value cost over peace of mind. 1: https://medium.com/@cyberpunk_networks/nsa-proof-your-email-2017-edition-f11a89697722 https://medium.com/@cyberpunk_networks/nsa-proof-your-email-...
        zimpenfish 9y ago
        > galera Unfortunately, with Galera, you're not even a hardware failure away from losing / corrupting email. https://aphyr.com/posts/327-jepsen-mariadb-galera-cluster https://aphyr.com/posts/327-jepsen-mariadb-galera-cluster > Unfortunately, even in totally healthy clusters, with no node failures or network failures, Galera Cluster does not satisfy its claims of Snapshot Isolation.
        cyberpunk 9y ago
        In this scenario the galera DB is only hosting virtual aliases/account info etc -- it's essentially read-only unless I'm adding accounts so the fail cases are less severe than if I was constantly writing data. I'll add a section on recovery, but even with a few hundred thousand email inboxes my database size is likely to be under 100mb and backing that up will cause no issues in live since I'm only doing SELECT 99.99% of the time; each of my nodes dumps the db into /var somewhere every hour.
    - smacktoward 9y ago
      (Disclaimer: anecdata follows) The Mastodon instance I use is hosted at Scaleway. It's had multiple multi-day outages due to failures at Scaleway's end. Cheap is great and all, but this experience has not been the kind that would lead me to recommend using Scaleway for any service you need to be reliable.
systems 9y ago
unreasonable compared to who? or to what? the comparable offer from google is also $5
castis 9y ago
I gladly pay them $5 a month because hosting my own email server sucked and I'd much rather pay someone else who does it well.
brongondwana 9y ago
Staff to run things well and develop new features, plus redundancy. We have roughly a 10/1 ratio of disk usage to quota by the time you count RAID overhead, local and offsite replica plus backups, and that includes really high end SSDs for indexes and recent emails. Sure we could half-arse things and run cheaper, but that's not the business we're in. We provide a high quality product, and we truly believe we're worth it. No apologies for that price, it's quite reasonable for the value we provide.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Fully agree. Fastmail is one of the very few "cloud" services I think is worth paying for (as an individual -- obviously businesses find value in e.g. AWS). I do the annual payment of $50 which effectively is two free months out of the year.
- hueving 9y ago
  > it's quite reasonable for the value we provide. The rest of your post is fine, but don't say this when pitching your product because value is entirely in the eye of the customer.
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    You're right - people who don't see that value won't be our customers, and I should have said "quite reasonable for the product that we provide" or similar instead. We have made a conscious choice that we aren't going to chase after the really price sensitive customer. We're OK with not having those customers. If price is your ONLY deciding factor, then FastMail isn't for you, because we'll never be the cheapest option. You can't compete with free if you don't have another funding source to subsidise the product. And we don't: all our income comes from selling our service, so we can't compete on price alone. We have to compete on quality, features and execution. I wound up moving this paragraph deep into the blog post because it wasn't the point of the post - but it is one of my key driving principles: "Our goal is to solve your email needs as quickly as possible so you can get on with everything else in your life." We don't want to keep our customers' eyeballs on our site longer than the minimum required to achieve their goals.
lettergram 9y ago
As a paying user, I find it's more than reasonable. Although, I do wish they'd seperate their calendar portion to another app - their email service is superb for the price. Else, I'd have to pay $5 / month minimum, to host my own -_-

tcfunk 9y ago

You'd be hard-pressed to find a VPS to rent and host your own email server for much less than $5/mo. And that's just an empty server! Now you've gotta set up the email software and hope to god people get your emails since they aren't coming from a reputable source.

zimpenfish 9y ago
You can get a Scaleways machine for €2.99 a month which will handle a reasonable volume of email. BUT. The ongoing faff and arsing about and maintenance isn't fun. If I didn't have many, many accounts for me and other people on my servers, I'd have migrated to FastMail a long time ago.
- tcfunk 9y ago
  Never heard of Scaleway...those prices seem to beat the pants of DigitalOcean. Might have to look into that, thank you for mentioning.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    They (Scaleway) are ARM machines, no?
    - cknight 9y ago
      Depends which offer you are looking at. They also have x86 VPS options using Atom chips.
    - zimpenfish 9y ago
      You can still run mail servers on them though. You might have to compile stuff up for yourself if your distro doesn't support it but I've found Arch to be pretty good in this respect.
      - cyberpunk 9y ago
        That's all fine, but then you're one hardware failure away from not being able to receive email. I'm working on a guide on how to setup a replicated fault tolerant email cluster (galera/dsync) here [1] -- feedback appreciated. This costs far more than something like fastmail, however. Depending on your situation you might value cost over peace of mind. 1: https://medium.com/@cyberpunk_networks/nsa-proof-your-email-2017-edition-f11a89697722 https://medium.com/@cyberpunk_networks/nsa-proof-your-email-...
        zimpenfish 9y ago
        > galera Unfortunately, with Galera, you're not even a hardware failure away from losing / corrupting email. https://aphyr.com/posts/327-jepsen-mariadb-galera-cluster https://aphyr.com/posts/327-jepsen-mariadb-galera-cluster > Unfortunately, even in totally healthy clusters, with no node failures or network failures, Galera Cluster does not satisfy its claims of Snapshot Isolation.
        cyberpunk 9y ago
        In this scenario the galera DB is only hosting virtual aliases/account info etc -- it's essentially read-only unless I'm adding accounts so the fail cases are less severe than if I was constantly writing data. I'll add a section on recovery, but even with a few hundred thousand email inboxes my database size is likely to be under 100mb and backing that up will cause no issues in live since I'm only doing SELECT 99.99% of the time; each of my nodes dumps the db into /var somewhere every hour.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    (Disclaimer: anecdata follows) The Mastodon instance I use is hosted at Scaleway. It's had multiple multi-day outages due to failures at Scaleway's end. Cheap is great and all, but this experience has not been the kind that would lead me to recommend using Scaleway for any service you need to be reliable.

systems 9y ago

unreasonable compared to who? or to what? the comparable offer from google is also $5

castis 9y ago

I gladly pay them $5 a month because hosting my own email server sucked and I'd much rather pay someone else who does it well.

brongondwana 9y ago

Staff to run things well and develop new features, plus redundancy. We have roughly a 10/1 ratio of disk usage to quota by the time you count RAID overhead, local and offsite replica plus backups, and that includes really high end SSDs for indexes and recent emails. Sure we could half-arse things and run cheaper, but that's not the business we're in. We provide a high quality product, and we truly believe we're worth it. No apologies for that price, it's quite reasonable for the value we provide.

ams6110 9y ago
Fully agree. Fastmail is one of the very few "cloud" services I think is worth paying for (as an individual -- obviously businesses find value in e.g. AWS). I do the annual payment of $50 which effectively is two free months out of the year.
hueving 9y ago
> it's quite reasonable for the value we provide. The rest of your post is fine, but don't say this when pitching your product because value is entirely in the eye of the customer.
- brongondwana 9y ago
  You're right - people who don't see that value won't be our customers, and I should have said "quite reasonable for the product that we provide" or similar instead. We have made a conscious choice that we aren't going to chase after the really price sensitive customer. We're OK with not having those customers. If price is your ONLY deciding factor, then FastMail isn't for you, because we'll never be the cheapest option. You can't compete with free if you don't have another funding source to subsidise the product. And we don't: all our income comes from selling our service, so we can't compete on price alone. We have to compete on quality, features and execution. I wound up moving this paragraph deep into the blog post because it wasn't the point of the post - but it is one of my key driving principles: "Our goal is to solve your email needs as quickly as possible so you can get on with everything else in your life." We don't want to keep our customers' eyeballs on our site longer than the minimum required to achieve their goals.

lettergram 9y ago

As a paying user, I find it's more than reasonable. Although, I do wish they'd seperate their calendar portion to another app - their email service is superb for the price. Else, I'd have to pay $5 / month minimum, to host my own -_-