Not sure if cloud hosted VMs count as selfhosted for the purposes of this community, but I run a lot of services at the house and want to have a few services that require high availability run in a cloud external to my home. Specifically, I want to run Vaultwarden, an email server and a VPN. My question is one of recommendations. Which cloud service provides the best uptime/stability and is ethical enough for consideration?
The ethics of some of these larger companies are no small part of the reason I chose to self host the majority(hopefully all soon) of the services that I use. So for instance Amazon and Microsoft are out. I currently use DigitalOcean for Vaultwarden, Zoho for domain email, and Nord for my VPN.
Edit: Thank you to everyone who provided recommendations and information. I have chosen to stick with DigitalOcean for VM hosting for the time being. General consensus seems to be positive.
I am working on self-hosting email much to the chagrin of some of the posters here with experience. I want to see how it works for me and am willing to deal with some headaches along the way. Time will tell whether I move that direction for my actual email or give up and use a ready made solution like proton. Time will also tell how much hair I have left when all is said and done after pulling it all out, lol.
Again, thank you to everyone who shared their knowledge and experience.
I wouldn’t actually selfhost email, it’s not particularly easy and there are many issues you will probably encounter. I recommend ProtonMail, it’s $3.50/month if you only need email and for $8/month you also get calendar, cloud storage, a password manager and a great VPN. Also, they are very focused on privacy and encryption and their apps are open source. Alternatively you can go with IVPN or Mullvad, both are great. Digitalocean has been fine in my experience, have you had any issues with it?
As far as I can see on their website, they don’t mention end to end encryption or zero-knowledge encryption. If that is true, it means that they are able to read all your emails (and so can the government if they order them to reveal the data). They sometimes use some pretty confusing marketing slag in general. It’s misleading because they advertise things like in-transit TLS encryption, which is standard nowadays. Even Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo and other mainstream email providers have this by default. This is nothing special and they hope that people think it means the same as E2EE. If you care about data ownership, you should also care about (end-to-end) encryption. Only when you are the only key holder, you can be sure that no one can access your private stuff.
They don’t do encrypted email. I never said they did. This is Self-Hosted, not Privacy.
They actually support their users, unlike Proton.
Proton’s spam filter refused to filter emails, when I’d added an address(es). And then it filtered known-good addresses, repeatedly, for my notification system, even after repeatedly marking them not spam.
What kind of amateur bullshit is that, in 2023?
Support basically said “too bad”. No kidding.
Fortunately I was only testing Proton, and had other notification channels for service alerts.
They basically told me to fuck off. Ok, fine, I will.
And I will preach how shitty they are at every turn.
Nope. No issues whatsoever. DigitalOcean is great. Just curious what this community thought. My main concern is, again, one of choosing as ethical a solution as I can find. I cited Amazon because they are a nightmare company for many reasons and would rather not give them money. With that said, I would also like a service that I can rely on.
I am thinking about proton mail, but I want to try to host an email sever with one of my cheap throwaway domains to see if it would be worth self hosting for my main domain. That’s the other part of why I am choosing to self host. I am genuinely curious how stuff works under the hood.
Sure, you go ahead and try it out for yourself to see if it works. Just wanted to let you know that selfhosting an Email server is not easy. Regarding ethics, I like Proton because they support privacy, open source software, and they never sold out to VC. Their website is accessible via Tor, they accept Bitcoin payments and they actually care about their users. That’s probably the most ethical email provider you can find.
Chiming in as another email self hoster; yes it comes with headaches but I can’t imagine it any other way. I use Mailinabox but am working on migrating over to the ISPMail setup. I don’t think that there’s any issues with self hosting mail and we need to stop discouraging it. There AIO solutions genuinely work well. If you’re concerned about stability then hold updates back until you can confirm that the newer versions are stable. Yes it is difficult and I don’t think most people should do it, but self hosters should be encouraged to do so if they feel capable and willing to take on the workload. We need more diversity in email hosting to prevent making it impossible. I also have no issues sending to large providers like gmail and the builtin nextcloud Integra is really nice. Unsure I’ll rebuild nextcloud but i might.
I want more control than those platforms offer me. I also want to separate out a lot of components like dns and other stuff. I want to more deeply integrate it into my existing infrastructure. And my current mail server was built before a lot of my now backbone infrastructure. It’s time to retire the server and replace it with what I need now. They’re VPS so i don’t feel bad, that’s part of the point. I have a harder time retiring actual hardware
Well, as someone also self-hosting email I agree with his solutions but he paints a picture of how bad it is that I feel is a bit exaggerated. But then again I host for myself and my family, I suspect it gets a bit different when you have many users and send hundreds of mail per day.
Only one I’ve had trouble with it Microsoft, they’re the strictest and you need to get some support from them to make it work reliably. Google has an automated service.
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I wouldn’t actually selfhost email, it’s not particularly easy and there are many issues you will probably encounter. I recommend ProtonMail, it’s $3.50/month if you only need email and for $8/month you also get calendar, cloud storage, a password manager and a great VPN. Also, they are very focused on privacy and encryption and their apps are open source. Alternatively you can go with IVPN or Mullvad, both are great. Digitalocean has been fine in my experience, have you had any issues with it?
And mailbox.org is way better than Proton in my opinion.
After getting blown off by Proton support to fix their spam filter, I switched.
Night and day. Proton is amateur hour in comparison.
As far as I can see on their website, they don’t mention end to end encryption or zero-knowledge encryption. If that is true, it means that they are able to read all your emails (and so can the government if they order them to reveal the data). They sometimes use some pretty confusing marketing slag in general. It’s misleading because they advertise things like in-transit TLS encryption, which is standard nowadays. Even Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo and other mainstream email providers have this by default. This is nothing special and they hope that people think it means the same as E2EE. If you care about data ownership, you should also care about (end-to-end) encryption. Only when you are the only key holder, you can be sure that no one can access your private stuff.
They don’t do encrypted email. I never said they did. This is Self-Hosted, not Privacy.
They actually support their users, unlike Proton.
Proton’s spam filter refused to filter emails, when I’d added an address(es). And then it filtered known-good addresses, repeatedly, for my notification system, even after repeatedly marking them not spam.
What kind of amateur bullshit is that, in 2023?
Support basically said “too bad”. No kidding.
Fortunately I was only testing Proton, and had other notification channels for service alerts.
They basically told me to fuck off. Ok, fine, I will.
And I will preach how shitty they are at every turn.
Fuck Proton.
Mailinabox it works. You are in control.
Been using it for 2 years. No problems.
Yeah, email is one of those things that’s better left to be someone else’s headache. DO and Vultr are great choices.
Yeah Vultr is great
Nope. No issues whatsoever. DigitalOcean is great. Just curious what this community thought. My main concern is, again, one of choosing as ethical a solution as I can find. I cited Amazon because they are a nightmare company for many reasons and would rather not give them money. With that said, I would also like a service that I can rely on.
I am thinking about proton mail, but I want to try to host an email sever with one of my cheap throwaway domains to see if it would be worth self hosting for my main domain. That’s the other part of why I am choosing to self host. I am genuinely curious how stuff works under the hood.
Sure, you go ahead and try it out for yourself to see if it works. Just wanted to let you know that selfhosting an Email server is not easy. Regarding ethics, I like Proton because they support privacy, open source software, and they never sold out to VC. Their website is accessible via Tor, they accept Bitcoin payments and they actually care about their users. That’s probably the most ethical email provider you can find.
Chiming in as another email self hoster; yes it comes with headaches but I can’t imagine it any other way. I use Mailinabox but am working on migrating over to the ISPMail setup. I don’t think that there’s any issues with self hosting mail and we need to stop discouraging it. There AIO solutions genuinely work well. If you’re concerned about stability then hold updates back until you can confirm that the newer versions are stable. Yes it is difficult and I don’t think most people should do it, but self hosters should be encouraged to do so if they feel capable and willing to take on the workload. We need more diversity in email hosting to prevent making it impossible. I also have no issues sending to large providers like gmail and the builtin nextcloud Integra is really nice. Unsure I’ll rebuild nextcloud but i might.
Why move to ISPMail over Mailinabox or Modoba or some other alternative?
I want more control than those platforms offer me. I also want to separate out a lot of components like dns and other stuff. I want to more deeply integrate it into my existing infrastructure. And my current mail server was built before a lot of my now backbone infrastructure. It’s time to retire the server and replace it with what I need now. They’re VPS so i don’t feel bad, that’s part of the point. I have a harder time retiring actual hardware
Thank you. Sounds exactly like what I’m planning. I am looking at ISPMail now and will be attempting to follow the directions soonly.
Glad to hear! It’s a lot I won’t lie, but I look forward to it. I finally have everything i need in place.
Well, as someone also self-hosting email I agree with his solutions but he paints a picture of how bad it is that I feel is a bit exaggerated. But then again I host for myself and my family, I suspect it gets a bit different when you have many users and send hundreds of mail per day.
Only one I’ve had trouble with it Microsoft, they’re the strictest and you need to get some support from them to make it work reliably. Google has an automated service.
Thank you! I appreciate it.