5 ms·

It's a great idea except that for one person it's going to cost a lot more than buying an account on FastMail (disclaimer: I work there) or any of the other hos

It's a great idea except that for one person it's going to cost a lot more than buying an account on FastMail (disclaimer: I work there) or any of the other hosting sites (even before you start start thinking redundancy and backups - we have about 10Tb of disk for every 1Tb of pure email quota, by the time you count search indexes and RAID and 3x replication redundancy - two local one offsite) For more than one person it can get cheaper, but you're going to be on call to fix it every time it breaks - because those other people aren't going to like waiting until you need it. Have fun with that (and I say this after being paged at 3:30am last night to fix a problem that was only affecting redundency for about 1% of our userbase - no user visible problems - most issues are solved without user visible outages)

spindritf 12y ago
Fastmail costs $40/yr. You can get a half-decent VPS for that with a few bucks to spare on Tarsnap.
- OSWJimlo 12y ago
  Unfortunately, there are other costs associated with running than just "a half-decent vps"... IN addition your vps probably has to be better than you expect. For example, ramnode ($20/year) does not give near enough ram to run anti-spam (e.g. amavisd or just clamav solo). You need on the order of a gig of ram. You won't get that for less than $5/mo or $50/year. You also must buy an ssl cert or else many other email providers will mark your email spam score up. You also must go through the operational burdon of setting things up and managing backups, restores, etc. This is perhaps 30 hours / year, which means you're already well over the cost of $40/yr. One thing to note is that for more than a few accounts (bring your own address, catchall, many aliases) you're unlikely to find something that costs as little as $40/year and the cost of running that yourself is identical, so that's where you can start to make money. I've gone down the route of using hosted and hosting my own mail and feel like I have a good understanding of the costs. Your flippant remark, completely disregarding even the system requirements, shows that you have not. Good day sir.
- gojomo 12y ago
  Just curious, what's the "half-decent VPS" you're thinking of for ~$3/month?
  - hackmiester 12y ago
    I'm not spindritf, but I am thinking of BuyVM: http://buyvm.net/ http://buyvm.net/
    - spindritf 12y ago
      You will probably need to go a little lower on the price than BuyVM to squeeze SpamAssasin in.
    - glomph 12y ago
      They do not have fantastic uptime.
  - spindritf 12y ago
    Whatever you can find at the time on http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendstock.com/ http://lowendstock.com/ http://www.lowendtalk.com/ http://www.lowendtalk.com/ or lowendwhatever from a provider that wasn't started yesterday and has decent reviews. A couple of weeks ago there was a dedicated server offer from online.net floating around for €1.99/mo http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/33122/1-99-%C2%A0dedicated-server http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/33122/1-99-%C2%A0dedicated-...
    - csmattryder 12y ago
      Definitely a +1 for LowEndSpirit, I've got two boxes with them, one for a blog and another working as a VPN to the US. They only provide IPv6 though, but it's trivial to set-up forwarding using Cloudflare's v6 to v4 proxy service.
  - lvillani 12y ago
    I have deployed Sovereign (https://github.com/al3x/sovereign https://github.com/al3x/sovereign) on a VPS at OVH. It costs me about 2.5 EUR a month and I also use it for purposes other than email.
hga 12y ago
I love these "illuminated by last night's glitch" posts, and I'm a happy FastMail user, but I'd like to point out that if you're doing it yourself you might be willing to relax some of the constraints that FastMail or the market imposes on itself. Especially in high availability, you might be willing to have a time to recovery that's measured in hours or at worst case days in case of a natural disaster.
plg 12y ago
I'm not sure the purpose here is to save people money. It's more about autonomy and privacy, no?
belorn 12y ago
If you want to give someone else the access and control for your correspondence, there are many cheaper alternatives than being personal responsible for it. Personally however, I am willing to pay to keep my private communication private. In my professional role, I consider it a requirement.

spindritf 12y ago

Fastmail costs $40/yr. You can get a half-decent VPS for that with a few bucks to spare on Tarsnap.

OSWJimlo 12y ago
Unfortunately, there are other costs associated with running than just "a half-decent vps"... IN addition your vps probably has to be better than you expect. For example, ramnode ($20/year) does not give near enough ram to run anti-spam (e.g. amavisd or just clamav solo). You need on the order of a gig of ram. You won't get that for less than $5/mo or $50/year. You also must buy an ssl cert or else many other email providers will mark your email spam score up. You also must go through the operational burdon of setting things up and managing backups, restores, etc. This is perhaps 30 hours / year, which means you're already well over the cost of $40/yr. One thing to note is that for more than a few accounts (bring your own address, catchall, many aliases) you're unlikely to find something that costs as little as $40/year and the cost of running that yourself is identical, so that's where you can start to make money. I've gone down the route of using hosted and hosting my own mail and feel like I have a good understanding of the costs. Your flippant remark, completely disregarding even the system requirements, shows that you have not. Good day sir.
gojomo 12y ago
Just curious, what's the "half-decent VPS" you're thinking of for ~$3/month?
- hackmiester 12y ago
  I'm not spindritf, but I am thinking of BuyVM: http://buyvm.net/ http://buyvm.net/
  - spindritf 12y ago
    You will probably need to go a little lower on the price than BuyVM to squeeze SpamAssasin in.
  - glomph 12y ago
    They do not have fantastic uptime.
- spindritf 12y ago
  Whatever you can find at the time on http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendstock.com/ http://lowendstock.com/ http://www.lowendtalk.com/ http://www.lowendtalk.com/ or lowendwhatever from a provider that wasn't started yesterday and has decent reviews. A couple of weeks ago there was a dedicated server offer from online.net floating around for €1.99/mo http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/33122/1-99-%C2%A0dedicated-server http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/33122/1-99-%C2%A0dedicated-...
  - csmattryder 12y ago
    Definitely a +1 for LowEndSpirit, I've got two boxes with them, one for a blog and another working as a VPN to the US. They only provide IPv6 though, but it's trivial to set-up forwarding using Cloudflare's v6 to v4 proxy service.
- lvillani 12y ago
  I have deployed Sovereign (https://github.com/al3x/sovereign https://github.com/al3x/sovereign) on a VPS at OVH. It costs me about 2.5 EUR a month and I also use it for purposes other than email.

hga 12y ago

I love these "illuminated by last night's glitch" posts, and I'm a happy FastMail user, but I'd like to point out that if you're doing it yourself you might be willing to relax some of the constraints that FastMail or the market imposes on itself. Especially in high availability, you might be willing to have a time to recovery that's measured in hours or at worst case days in case of a natural disaster.

plg 12y ago

I'm not sure the purpose here is to save people money. It's more about autonomy and privacy, no?

belorn 12y ago

If you want to give someone else the access and control for your correspondence, there are many cheaper alternatives than being personal responsible for it. Personally however, I am willing to pay to keep my private communication private. In my professional role, I consider it a requirement.