Mail server PoC
Recently I've been asked to make a calculation if it is worth it to migrate 18domain managed hosting to our own VPS. It's mostly Laravel web apps, static websites or wordpress.
Long story short it when I picked a really low budget long term Contabo VPS it ended up being roughly the same price. Although there is a lot of overhead management due to bundled services like GitLab, mail services... During that time I realised, I have little to no knowledge running a mail server. The cost of external service such as MXRoute would be 100€/y on our scale of usage. That is about 35% of the whole cost distribution of VPS and mailing together.
I run a small PoC self-hosting a mail server and here are some things I learned:
- Choosing the actual server that fits purpose not that the one with many features. My pick was Stalwart. It does it all-in-one. One container and all of this: anti spam, queues, storage, certs, security, mailbox access, full SMTP server. Another container was the web UI with Roundcube connecting to it.
- Actual outgoing mails gets automatically flagged as spam due to the usage of residential IP, yes the internet warned me. The solution was a Brevo smtp relay server with a cap of 300 mail per day for free.
Taking this onto our responsibility of uptime using Stalwart and Roundcube we could slash down the cost.
My own PoC confirmed that we could really do the migration this way to save on the operational cost and get more compute power. The question still remains on how reliable it would be and how much toil would it introduce.
