I think more of us need to run mail servers. For ourselves, for our families, and possibly for others who are willing to pay. Email is far too centralized now,

I think more of us need to run mail servers. For ourselves, for our families, and possibly for others who are willing to pay. Email is far too centralized now, at a handful of companies, in a handful of data centers. So in that regard, running a mail server on a VPS at one of the popular providers is kind of missing the point. My local cable ISP doesn't allow incoming or outgoing connections to port 25, nor incoming connections to port 80. So at least for now, I can't run a mail server in my home. I've thought about switching to DSL, but then I would take a major hit in speed, in both directions. Luckily, I have another option. There's a hosting provider where I live (Wichita, Kansas) that offers KVM-based virtual machine hosting. So I'll get a VM there, and if the service is any good, I'll move there from Linode. The pricing isn't competitive with Linode, let alone DigitalOcean, and I doubt that the connectivity is as good, since the server will be in a building here in Wichita rather than a real data center. But I'm willing to try it, in order to support a local business and fight the centralization of the Internet.