I've run my email server in VM's at a variety of ISP's like GoDaddy, Linode and AWS Lightsail and never had an issue, well once when Microsoft banned a group of

I've run my email server in VM's at a variety of ISP's like GoDaddy, Linode and AWS Lightsail and never had an issue, well once when Microsoft banned a group of IP's in a drag net. I filed a request with them and they fixed it in a week or so. Real hardware servers are not required to host email.