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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 th

by 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.

by tcfunk 9y ago

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.