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.
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.
Thank you! I appreciate it.
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.
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.