Moving my email server off DigitalOcean
When I deployed my email server with DigitalOcean five years back, it delivered at a competitive price and performance. A few years later, the same server has gotten a price hike but no upgrades or resource increases. Even so, hosting your email server is not for the faint of heart, and IP reputation is a big part of the game. Therefore, I stayed with DigitalOcean until the depletion of resources finally forced my hand.
After five years of service, it’s time to retire my DigitalOcean hosted email server.
Server cost and resources
I enjoy squeezing out the maximum value from a minimum of dollars so I ran the email server on a basic droplet. It’s a far cry from any recommended server specification for email hosting, but it was reliable.
| Memory | vCPU | SSD | Transfer | $/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | 1 vCPU | 25 GB | 1 TB | $6.00 |
I looked into resizing my droplet to add more RAM and disk space, but doubling memory and storage on this droplet would also double the price. I don’t want to spend 12$ per month on what I still consider a minimal configuration.
Getting the most bang for your bucks
I wanted to host my server with a serious and reliable provider that could offer the same stability I enjoyed with DigitalOcean. After doing some research I ended up with a company where I was an existing customer.
Contabo is a German hosting provider with great deals on virtual private servers. My new email server is hosted by its entry-level Cloud VPS 1.
| Memory | vCPU | SSD | Transfer | $/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 GB | 4 vCPU | 400 GB | 32 TB | $5.50 |
Contabo allows inbound and outbound traffic on email ports, over both IPv4 and IPv6.
A new email server with zero reputation
After remote syncing the data from my old email server, I was ready to figure out how much of an issue mail deliverability would be when starting with a fresh IP address. To my great surprise, the Axis of Evil (Microsoft, Google, and Apple) all accepted my messages, even without slapping a spam label on them.
Maybe the tech giants feel they killed off decentralized email and no longer need to bother with the outliers.
A note on Contabo
Contabo might have the best price-to-performance ratio, but they do not have the most feature-rich and user-friendly control panel. If you know what you’re doing that’s not an issue. If not, then maybe it’s not the best fit for your needs.
Contabo’s VPS control panel shows a list of my currently deployed servers.
Future migrations
The only US-based hosting provider I still have servers with is Vultr. Vultr is slightly more affordable when compared to DigitalOcean, but I believe it’s time to relocate to Germany.
