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Your Preferred Web/Email Hosting Provider?
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Your Preferred Web/Email Hosting Provider?

Hi Folks,

Any tips of a rock solid (longevity & performance) web/email hosting provider?

Desired features:
* webmail interface
* storage size/speed not critical - low volume, mostly text
* unlimited email addresses
* multiple domains preferred
* anti-virus preferred
* anti-spam preferred (spam filter)

Currently on IONOS, seems good if a bit pricey (for that) considering options out there.

Much thanks,
MrNiceGuy

«1

Comments

  • I currently use Rackspace just because they're cheaper than Microsoft and Google. Less than $3/month per account. Reliable but everything else looks like stupid.

    Thanked by 1greentea
  • HalfEatenPieHalfEatenPie Veteran
    edited January 2023

    MXRoute over with Jarland is pretty good and has great value. Just don't spam and you're fine.

    Thanked by 2greentea Talistech
  • I use OVH for my hosting and emails

  • tjntjn Member

    MXRoute sounds ideal for what you want.

  • MXRoute++

  • MXRoute seems to be getting a lot of love! Thanks, folks... they seem very "no nonsense" which is great!

    I've never used Rackspace and I've had a couple of servers at OVH Cloud (rock solid, honestly - never used them for email hosting.

    I'm gonna stick with IONOS for personal "vanity" email, but will consider MXRoute for next business client!

    Much obliged ALL!

  • +1 for mxroute

    multiple webmail option including roundcube and crossbox

  • stonedstoned Member
    edited January 2023

    Me, myself, and I. Self hosted MTA + MDA + 4x PMG (Proxmox Mail Gateways) to deliver mail to my server. Rrarely/barely any spam. How much does it cost me? $5/mo for a 1G VPS I got years before I discovered LET. I've been self hosting email since 2010, thirteen years now.

    Both of the Racknerd IPs have neutral rep. I can try to send mail from them and see if the whole setup can be done for $14/yr budget.

    I'm still curious how Racknerd is able to provide such low costs. It's basically $10.18/yr IPv4 rental, plus VPS resources. Is this something one should be concerned about?

    • Any illegal activities, illegal either in the United States of America, or your residing country.
    • Utilizing services in a harassing or threatening manner
    • SPAM, SPIM, or SPIT activities
    • Copyright Infringement and DMCA
    • Excessive resource use that disrupts our network or other clients

    Looks like Racknerd doesn't automatically block SMTP on 25 but I've not yet tested.

    I send mail through 465 and 25 is only for receiving on my end. My SMTP servers are never open to the world. As far as the world is concerned, my SMTP server doesn't exist. Since the 4x PMG servers only relay mail, trying to send anything through them is 100% automatically rejected.

    You asked about providers. But self hosted is also a possibility, with a lot of work, depending on if you want self autonomy or trade some for ease of use.

    If you use those ready-made ALL IN ONE self hosted mail solutions, you will need at least 2-4GB per server (if you want to deploy more than one). If you do it yourself, Debian or Alpine minimal, just the needed services, postfix/exim/dovecot/whatever, you can do it in like 512MB RAM, probably less. Spam Assassin might take some more resources so 512, otherwise it could be done on 256MB as well. If you use clam-av, you'd need at least 2 GB RAM or more, as the virus definitions are kept in memory.

    Cheers.

  • ArkasArkas Moderator

    MXRoute is the best option IMO, @jar has done a superb job.

    Thanked by 1jar
  • @Arkas said: MXRoute is the best option IMO, @jar has done a superb job.

    ^This

    Thanked by 1jar
  • HalfEatenPieHalfEatenPie Veteran
    edited January 2023

    @stoned said: I'm still curious how Racknerd is able to provide such low costs. It's basically $10.18/yr IPv4 rental, plus VPS resources. Is this something one should be concerned about?

    You can bring down cost of operations pretty significantly if you:

    • Have old IPv4 space you pretty much got for very affordable rates (like not current market rates but owned direct, so all you have to pay is the annual fees which is literally pennies on the IP)
    • Using older hardware (where ROI is already gained, so only thing really costing them is the power and the network usage)
    • Node balancing (aka, overselling... There have been people historically who have crammed a lot of VMs into a single server but as many people "idle" their VPSes, especially here on LET when it's "such a deal that they don't want to miss out and have extra capacity in case they need it" or use low-resource consuming services that it's pretty much negligible... yeah).

    Same strategies CVPS/GVH/a few other hosts around here uses/used.

    The margins on them gets pretty high (lets say monthly the unit cost per full-server node is like 20 dollars... if you buy racks and racks of space or get a solid deal)... You get like 50 customers (this is on the low-end) even paying for 14 dollars a year that's already 700 dollars. Subtracting the 240 dollars (for the years worth of colo fees) that's like 460 dollars in profits annually. You put 100 servers on a single server then that's already up to 1160 dollars. Now the actual costs are probably bare minimum, but you get the picture. Even up that to like 80 dollars a month and you still made a decent profit per server. You then snowball those profits and re-invest it by buying new hardwares that are "eye-catching" like Ryzen hardware. I mean you can build a decent ryzen node for like what... 2/3k? Sell it as it's own line with a bit more of a higher cost but with the "novelty of higher clock speed Ryzen" and you're bringing in even more $$$. The unit economics makes sense.

    Remember the BoomerHost guy? There's a post somewhere where I did an entire breakdown analysis and he gave some internal numbers. He has very low expenses and basically overcrowds his server. He comes off with like 1k or 2k in profits a year initially, but I'm sure he's probably making more now. (Now do I personally value my time where I'm willing to spend all that time for 2k in profits a year? Even 10k in profits? I mean... not really. But for others it might make sense).

    Rinse and repeat. It's not "insane" how Racknerd does it. This doesn't require a significant amount of capital to startup (like you can probably get started comfortably with 10k or so... probably 5k if you're really frugal) but it takes up a fair amount of your time unless you have everything automated... which is what they probably do. Because you have to cut the fat, you have to run very lean, probably cut corners that others might not feel comfortable doing. It's a higher-risk (imho) and if/when shit hits the fan it'll be much harder to recover from (imho, from seeing businesses grown this aggressively, there's usually some severe technical debt behind-the-scenes that usually doesn't get addressed until it's too late). It's also extremely low margins per unit sold but it's "liveable" due to economy of scale. Also Iirc RN roughly spends about 1k a month or so in marketing alone... It's really cheap/almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, but their return on that 1k or 2k in monthly marketing giveaways generates like 5k~10k in additional business a month.

    For someone who's been in the game long enough, you have enough connections that you can get your expenses down pretty low. Dustin has been around as part of QN and other ventures for a long time now. He definitely has the strategic partnerships required to bring his expenses down to the bare minimum price. His product then pushes that to the extreme. If people complain about server performance, move them over to an under-utilized server or a newer provisioning server and rinse and repeat. Most people won't care and it'll probably auto-balance out over time (is an assumption).

    Edit: Just wanted to add. A recent (October 2022) YABS from Racknerd shows E5-2697 v2 is the CPU used. This CPU is sold for like 40~50 dollars per processor on the secondhand market. These use DDR3 RAM, which the ECC version costs like 10 dollars to 20 dollars a stick. If you're really frugal, a full VPS node probably costs like 400-500 dollars to build completely. With cheap colocation and network (aka, even at 50 dollars a month), lets say you need about 1,100 dollars the first year to break even. You need to sell about 80 14 dollar/year VM to break even on the hardware and colocation costs the first year. After that, you're 500 dollars in profit per year per node. Multiply this by 10 and it's already 5,000 dollars a year in profit. Etc.

    None of these numbers are going to be exactly right or even representative. The purpose is to give a back-of-the-napkin understanding of what one can imagine is going on in the finances side.

  • MrNiceGuyMrNiceGuy Member
    edited January 2023

    @stoned said:
    You asked about providers. But self hosted is also a possibility, with a lot of work, depending on if you want self autonomy or trade some for ease of use.

    If you use those ready-made ALL IN ONE self hosted mail solutions, you will need at least 2-4GB per server (if you want to deploy more than one). If you do it yourself, Debian or Alpine minimal, just the needed services, postfix/exim/dovecot/whatever, you can do it in like 512MB RAM, probably less. Spam Assassin might take some more resources so 512, otherwise it could be done on 256MB as well. If you use clam-av, you'd need at least 2 GB RAM or more, as the virus definitions are kept in memory.

    Cheers.

    I considered self-hosting, but didn't quite trust myself. I mean I'm an IT guy. I could get it working, but was afraid I'd eventually miss something. I'd feel comfortable giving it 2-3 vCores and 4GB, and I love RackNerd! $3/month a lot of bang!

    I was looking at iRedMail https://www.iredmail.org/ See, now you got me considering trying it for Schlitz & Giggles. I think I have a RackNerd VPS with 768MB :)

    Cheers!

  • MXroute and Purelymail.

    Thanked by 1jar
  • crunchbitscrunchbits Member, Patron Provider, Top Host

    @MrNiceGuy said:

    @stoned said:
    You asked about providers. But self hosted is also a possibility, with a lot of work, depending on if you want self autonomy or trade some for ease of use.

    If you use those ready-made ALL IN ONE self hosted mail solutions, you will need at least 2-4GB per server (if you want to deploy more than one). If you do it yourself, Debian or Alpine minimal, just the needed services, postfix/exim/dovecot/whatever, you can do it in like 512MB RAM, probably less. Spam Assassin might take some more resources so 512, otherwise it could be done on 256MB as well. If you use clam-av, you'd need at least 2 GB RAM or more, as the virus definitions are kept in memory.

    Cheers.

    I considered self-hosting, but didn't quite trust myself. I mean I'm an IT guy. I could get it working, but was afraid I'd eventually miss something. I'd feel comfortable giving it 2-3 vCores and 4GB, and I love RackNerd! $3/month a lot of bang!

    I was looking at iRedMail https://www.iredmail.org/ See, now you got me considering trying it for Schlitz & Giggles. I think I have a RackNerd VPS with 768MB :)

    Cheers!

    Delivery to customers (for business use) was utmost importance for me. At a certain point there just aren't enough hours in the day to really sit and mess with stuff or take the risk of non-delivery while also keeping my sanity. Big recommendation from me for MXRoute. Offloading e-mail/reputation handling to MXRoute and buying access to their expertise is absolutely worth it. The one time we had an issue (on our end, from a crappy phone email client) @jar responded in minutes, had everything fixed even though it was on us, and gave us really useful information going forward.

    Thanked by 1jar
  • I run all my email through a reseller account on RackNerd. Previously I had email (MXRoute) via NexusBytes but ditched that a few months ago due to the emerging company issues. I haven't noticed any difference when it comes to mail getting through and so on. If checking mail on my phone I prefer the experience through cPanel compared to MXRoute.

    Thanked by 2stoned ElonBezos
  • Lots of other great providers out there. MXRoute has been mentioned several times, Purelymail has a few nods too, both good. Those seem to get mentioned a lot in this forum for good reason. But there are alternatives.

    One that comes to mind if you want a provider with advanced webmail with a lot of features and lots of domains and aliases, is Fastmail. Fastmail has a really good domain and alias system IMO. It even has built-in simple website hosting (for static files) and its own DNS service. A lot of people don't know about that. And it has a good smartphone app, with calendar, notes as well. Very good service if you want to spend $5 per month per user. If you need a lot of users, then it adds up though. But if you need just one account, it's very flexible considering all the features it has. Good luck!

  • mxroute is great but bad latency from asia, is there any asia alternative ?

  • stonedstoned Member
    edited January 2023

    @MrNiceGuy said:
    I considered self-hosting, but didn't quite trust myself. I mean I'm an IT guy. I could get it working, but was afraid I'd eventually miss something. I'd feel comfortable giving it 2-3 vCores and 4GB, and I love RackNerd! $3/month a lot of bang!

    I was looking at iRedMail https://www.iredmail.org/ See, now you got me considering trying it for Schlitz & Giggles. I think I have a RackNerd VPS with 768MB :)

    Cheers!

    You should definitely check it out. Try setting up everything yourself. I think I spent a few hours a day for a couple of weeks 12 years ago. It's been working ever since.

    Once or twice the MTA updated and changed some config directives which I updated which is not a big deal at all.

    I'm not sure why people are so afraid of hosting mail themselves. If you get all the parts aligned, it's easy and rewarding.

    Unlimited domains.
    Unlimited email inboxes.
    Unlimited disk space.
    Unlimited temporary emails.
    Unlimited aliases.

    I can choose any webmail software to use at my discretion. I currently use claws-mail. For mobile I use Rainloop online.

    Total control + Autonomy over my setup.
    Excellent virus/spam protection.
    Easy to use IMAP config.
    Easy to use secure SMTP config for any software to send mail.
    6 years on one IP, then 6 on another.
    Never sent spam.
    Domains/IPs are 100% not only clean, but have 'GOOD' standing/reputation.

    Downtime 1: once MTA changed configs, I didn't notice for a few days, mails didn't come through. I rarely get any mails or send any so it wasn't an issue. Whatever I missed, I'm sure they'll send it again.

    Downtime 2: I once messed up my config myself, but have many redundant backups now. Just a few hours until I got it back up.

    Downtime in 12 years? Few days at most and some hours. 0.1% of 12+ years is 4.38290639 days. 0.1% downtime is what almost anyone guarantees... mine is less than 0.1% of 12 years!

    In case something goofy happens, I have a reseller shared cPanel hosting, 50GB, 10 cPanel accounts, I'm sure unlimited domains/inboxes, and everything works hunky dory there. I can always switch my MX records to point to the cPanel host and domains/records/emails everything is already added there, so I would only have to wait for MX DNS record propagation, and SMTP continues delivery for 7 days by SPEC so we're good, so soon as MX switches over, MAIL delivery will resume.

    The only tedious part is manually adding all your domains/inboxes to cPanel.

    You can't put a price on this. Then again, for people who don't want to do this, MXRoute has amazing reputation and you can put a price on that and pay it and be hunky dory.

    Thanked by 1RFord
  • all of the shared options make fastmail look like a ripoff. but i wonder how much of a hassle it is to send emails from above services without landing on spam box.

  • crunchbitscrunchbits Member, Patron Provider, Top Host

    @jlet88 said:
    Lots of other great providers out there. MXRoute has been mentioned several times, Purelymail has a few nods too, both good. Those seem to get mentioned a lot in this forum for good reason. But there are alternatives.

    One that comes to mind if you want a provider with advanced webmail with a lot of features and lots of domains and aliases, is Fastmail. Fastmail has a really good domain and alias system IMO. It even has built-in simple website hosting (for static files) and its own DNS service. A lot of people don't know about that. And it has a good smartphone app, with calendar, notes as well. Very good service if you want to spend $5 per month per user. If you need a lot of users, then it adds up though. But if you need just one account, it's very flexible considering all the features it has. Good luck!

    I can second that Fastmail was actually decent when we were first just trying to gtfo google business apps many years ago. The app was solid, web UI is good, lots of extras (if you want them) and is way more of a direct replacement for gsuite stuff. The downside was the cost and the fact that we needed more freedom for integrating services to send mail out. Thats where something like MXRoute makes way more sense but it definitely is a viable alternative.

  • @jignes_k said:
    all of the shared options make fastmail look like a ripoff. but i wonder how much of a hassle it is to send emails from above services without landing on spam box.

    MXRoute is definitely no hassle to send emails without landing in the spam box, the others I've got no idea. Regular reseller hosting can be a bit hit and miss with IP rep.

    Thanked by 1jignes_k
  • @jignes_k said:
    all of the shared options make fastmail look like a ripoff. but i wonder how much of a hassle it is to send emails from above services without landing on spam box.

    YMMV, but it depends on what you consider a ripoff and what features you are comparing or need or want. Fastmail and MXRoute are not a direct apples-to-apples comparison.

    If you are looking for max number of accounts+domains+aliases for the money with a reputation for good deliverability, then of course MXRoute is a good deal and also a good service.

    The main thing with Fastmail is if you need just one account but with a ton of other features (some surprisingly useful) and an excellent in-house webmail, what you can do with Fastmail is also a good deal and a good service.

    It all depends on what someone wants. There are a lot of other providers that might fit the OP as well. But from the specs listed by the OP, both MXRoute and Fastmail (and Purelymail and many others) would probably qualify, but with different advantages. So the next question might be what else might the OP want?

    Personally, I'd suggest trying out a bunch of services. Over the years, I've been surprised that email providers are still innovating, especially in the last few years, and sometimes a small feature that might seem insignificant can make a nice positive impact on your life or business and be a net positive you didn't expect.

    Some providers are investing heavily in the back-end (clearly mail deliverability is a big deal to @jar and MXRoute, for example, and his approach has paid off). Fastmail is no stranger to deliverability issues having been in business for over 20 years, but they've been focusing a lot in recent years on usability, and their efforts show nicely in their webmail and extra features. Still other providers, like Hey.com, are focused entirely on solving workflow issues with a fresh take on how someone might process email in general. Some very good ideas coming from Hey.com. And then services like ProtonMail of course focus on encryption and privacy, etc..

    So there's something for everyone out there. There are no real apples-to-apples comparisons, just what an individual needs and whether or not a service has more of what they want.

    Thanked by 1jignes_k
  • And self-hosting is great too BTW, if you want to take on that responsibility and definite challenges. I marvel at people who are successful at it and can mitigate all the security and deliverability issues that inevitably happen. Some consider it an adventure and worth every challenge, some consider it a nightmarish burden. I've tried it several times over the years and for me, the negatives and stress always outweighed the benefits in the end. But eventually I would go ahead and try again... only to be met with the same stress. So now I prefer to trust my email to the experts who live and breathe email, and I sleep a little better at night. But it was fun to do for a time, and you might love it.

  • self-hosting + Mailcow

  • 📧🐮

    Thanked by 1JohnFilch123
  • ArkasArkas Moderator

    @JohnFilch123 said: self-hosting + Mailcow

    = extreme stress

  • @Arkas said:

    @JohnFilch123 said: self-hosting + Mailcow

    = extreme stress

    0 stress actually

  • HostMayoHostMayo Member, Host Rep

    @JohnFilch123 said:

    @Arkas said:

    @JohnFilch123 said: self-hosting + Mailcow

    = extreme stress

    0 stress actually

    using mail.baby for email deliverability since Microsoft network started blocking our emails as ip never leaves their block list no matter what we do. However mail.baby itself some times fail. We send only transactional emails to our registered users so will this Mailcow option work for us especially for delivering to outlook network.

  • tomletomle Member, LIR

    @stoned said:
    Me, myself, and I. Self hosted MTA + MDA + 4x PMG (Proxmox Mail Gateways) to deliver mail to my server. Rrarely/barely any spam. How much does it cost me? $5/mo for a 1G VPS I got years before I discovered LET. I've been self hosting email since 2010, thirteen years now.

    Both of the Racknerd IPs have neutral rep. I can try to send mail from them and see if the whole setup can be done for $14/yr budget.

    I'm still curious how Racknerd is able to provide such low costs. It's basically $10.18/yr IPv4 rental, plus VPS resources. Is this something one should be concerned about?

    • Any illegal activities, illegal either in the United States of America, or your residing country.
    • Utilizing services in a harassing or threatening manner
    • SPAM, SPIM, or SPIT activities
    • Copyright Infringement and DMCA
    • Excessive resource use that disrupts our network or other clients

    Looks like Racknerd doesn't automatically block SMTP on 25 but I've not yet tested.

    I send mail through 465 and 25 is only for receiving on my end. My SMTP servers are never open to the world. As far as the world is concerned, my SMTP server doesn't exist. Since the 4x PMG servers only relay mail, trying to send anything through them is 100% automatically rejected.

    You asked about providers. But self hosted is also a possibility, with a lot of work, depending on if you want self autonomy or trade some for ease of use.

    If you use those ready-made ALL IN ONE self hosted mail solutions, you will need at least 2-4GB per server (if you want to deploy more than one). If you do it yourself, Debian or Alpine minimal, just the needed services, postfix/exim/dovecot/whatever, you can do it in like 512MB RAM, probably less. Spam Assassin might take some more resources so 512, otherwise it could be done on 256MB as well. If you use clam-av, you'd need at least 2 GB RAM or more, as the virus definitions are kept in memory.

    Cheers.

    Why the PMG at all? If your main server is down, then senders will try to resend according to the rfc.
    And I'm not sure but if you have for example domain.com and domain.net etc and [email protected] and then a lot of aliases like [email protected] -> [email protected], do all of those need to exist in PMG for it to accept the email?
    Or will PMG just blanket accept all email to your domains? Then your main mail server will probably reject when it gets the email from PMG.

  • I don't like to move/migrate main mail accounts around so I picked up something what I believe is build to last.

    I prefer privacy oriented german mailbox.org, mail provider in the same league as protonmail and tutanota for 3 euros / monthly or 30 euros/ yearly with possibility to add 25 mailbox.org aliases and 50 own domains / aliases, some cloud quota and all the other goodies (calendar, tasks, etherpad, PGP, disposable addresses, some control over levels of spamprotection, one time passwords, etc...) with relatively cheap quota upgrades (if needed in the future) compared to the lets say protonmail.

    I use it also as entry point to my self hosted nextcloud storages via WebDAV.

    If memory serve me correct they have more than 30 staff and operate from two company owned datacenters.

    Thanked by 1MrNiceGuy
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