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by sashk 3526 days ago
I was researching this. And still am.

I always come to conclusion that either I have to host mail for myself, or use Google Apps.

I can't trust Microsoft to host my email, nor I want to trust Rackspace (for some odd reason, two feedbacks I received were from people who had negative experiences with them). Zoho is nice choise, but they had multi-week outage year or two ago, with somewhat unclear notification to users.

Fastmail was always second choice, because it was more expensive for amount of mail I have now, which will need to be stored on their servers.

Also, as I'll be hosting email for family, I calculate for 5 accounts.

Google Apps came out to 25/month.

Self-hosting option came out to one Linode machine, plus one other VPS provider machine located in different location for backup MX. That came out to 15/month.

Fastmail was more expensive at the time (was I looking at business account for some reason?), but their pricing page -- https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ -- shows that they are same price as Google. Can't seem to find their multi-year discount information.

2 comments

Hey sashk,

Sorry to hear you don't trust us. Is there anything I can clear up, or any questions I can answer? Feel free to email me directly - faisal.misle(at)rackspace.com. I'd love to hear any feedback/questions/concerns.

> Self-hosting option came out to one Linode machine, plus one other VPS provider machine

So, that’s what “self-hosting” means nowadays? Because of course we can’t have these infernal machines in our homes; what are we, savages, to sully our hands with manual labor and physical hardware? /s

Note: Your home is the only place where you can host your server and be reasonably sure that the government is at least going to show you a warrant when they want all your data.

Good luck in finding an ISP that will let unrestricted SMTP traffic without paying an arm and a leg for a "business account."
I understand that, but unfortunately my provider at home is blocking port 25 (both directions), so that's not an option.
Use a home machine then tunnel to one VPS for an endpoint. Saves one box.
Your ISP allows incoming and outgoing port 25? You're likely already in every DNSBL out there.