Web/Email Hosting Suggestions?

[Dale Hodge]

Can anyone recommend an inexpensive Web & Email host?  For the past decade I've been hosting my small website and email on my own servers, but I'm now considering going to an outside service.  So far each I've looked at have either had significant restrictions on email, or have lacked any kind of tools for filtering and sorting. Perhaps I will have to go to separate accounts for web hosting and email, if that's the case, does anyone have suggestions for an email host?  I have 2 domains and 3 users (1 shared on both), so I don't want to pay a lot per user.  

--Dale

[Nate Bargmann]

Dale,

I have my hosting with http://www.qth.com/ with one domain and several
email accounts. I am using the "starter" plan and seem to staying
within its limits. All I can say is post a question about your
requirements and see what Scott can offer.

HTH,

- Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us

[Jonathan Hall]

I spent some significant time researching this about 6 months ago. I decided I was tired of being a sys admin for my low volume of web and email traffic.

In the end, I decided I couldn't find good email hosting I was happy with (if you find something, though, please share!). So I ended up with:

siteground.com to host my Wordpress blog
Godaddy to do my DNS
A cheap Linux virtual server to host my email (and for the occasional remote shell access, etc), and some throw-away file web/ftp hosting (i.e. poor man's dropbox)

I'm paying roughly $13 to Rackspace for my virtual server which includes 256mb RAM and 10gb storage. There are much cheaper options available these days (in fact today I signed up to try a Digital Ocean Xen-based virtual server for $5/mo for 512mb RAM and 24gb SSD storage).

Depending on the reasons you're considering moving away from your own server, some of this info may or may not be helpful :)

-- Jonathan

On 11/17/2015 09:46 PM, Dale Hodge wrote:

Can anyone recommend an inexpensive Web & Email host?  For the past decade I've been hosting my small website and email on my own servers, but I'm now considering going to an outside service.  So far each I've looked at have either had significant restrictions on email, or have lacked any kind of tools for filtering and sorting. Perhaps I will have to go to separate accounts for web hosting and email, if that's the case, does anyone have suggestions for an email host?  I have 2 domains and 3 users (1 shared on both), so I don't want to pay a lot per user.  

--Dale

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[Dale W Hodge]

Your reasons and mine are the same, nothing wrong with hosting my own, but I'd really rather somebody else be responsible for keeping it running 24/7. :-)   What I may end up doing is let whatever web host I pick provide the initial mailbox and then use fetchmail or getmail to pull it to a local server so I can archive and do proper sorting.  While it doesn't keep me from having to run a local mail spool it does provide for a way to continue to get email if something goes horribly wrong on my end.   Not to mention that if I can run things on something that uses 10 watts instead of 400 watts I might save enough on power to pay for the hosting. ;-)

I don't have any experience with hosted virtual servers, are they configurable for whatever services and available 24/7? 

Thanks Jonathan!

[Jonathan Hall]

"Virtual server" has come to mean many different things these days, from a simple web virtual host, to a full-fledged virtual server instance. You want the latter, and it will give you what you need.  You have your own kernel*, your own root account, your own Linux distribution, your own IP address, etc.  So you'll still be a sysadmin in the fullest sense, you just won't have to worry about hardware reliability.

Some (many, most?) virtual server hosts will offer nightly/weekly backups of your server, monitoring services, and possibly even some level of system administration, if you're willing to pay for these services.  I have been paying Rackspace for backups (comes to like $2/month extra for my particular setup).

Note, however, that, as far as I can tell, Rackspace is no longer selling new accounts like mine (my account was part of an acquisition, so I've been grandfathered in). But as I mentioned in my earlier email, there are many other companies selling very small virtual hosts for even less than I'm paying Rackspace.

Hope that helps.

-- Jonathan

*Some virtual server technologies share a kernel, or "parts" of a kernel with the parent machine, but from the perspective of your running applications, they effectively have their own kernel.

!DSPAM:564bca3824651090315786! --

[Nate Bargmann]

I have an Amazon Web Services virtual machine running for when it
appeared that I would be stuck behind a Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) due to
our ISP no longer serving this area last spring. I set it up with
Debian Wheezy and used it as an SSH go-between for a time for remote
access. Fortunately, the ISP has since upgraded the equipment for this
area and we have a higher speed connection and a fairly stable IP
address I can SSH to again so I really don't need the host any more.

An individual can get a good feel if it will work and the first year is
at no cost: https://aws.amazon.com/

I found that for the personal hosts the IP address will change if the
instance is stopped and then started from their Web UI but will remain
the same if the VM is simply rebooted from within it for a kernel
upgrade and the like.

[Jason Klein]

I am very pleased with our Linux servers on Amazon/AWS. You could setup your own personal Linux email and/or web server on an AWS t2.micro server for $113/year.  They offer generous server discounts if you commit to 1 year or 3 years in advance.

If you are new to AWS, their pricing options are going to be overwhelming! Here is an example of total 3-year cost for a personal server. Keep in mind that you pay for the actual storage you allocate and the actual bandwidth you use.  If you were to only allocate 15GB of server disk storage and you only used 5GB bandwidth per month, your actual cost would be much lower! Their usage-based model really shines if you really don’t need much storage or bandwidth.

Server (EC2 t2.micro w/ 1GB ram):  $162 ($109 initial + $1.46/mo)

Storage (EBS SSD 30GB): $108 ($0.10/GB/MO)

Outgoing Bandwidth (540GB): $49 ($0.09/GB)

Incoming Bandwidth: FREE

Static IP (Elastic IP): FREE

TOTAL 3-YEAR COST:  $319  ($109 initial + $5.83/month)

PS - They have a FREE TIER which provides new customers with the exact same server/storage/bandwidth configuration for FREE for a full year.

Jason

[Steven Saner]

We, Hubris Communications, in Wichita, offer web and email hosting. It
may or may not qualify as "inexpensive" per your definition, but I can
vouch for the quality of hosting. Email me directly if you would like to
discuss specifics.

Steve

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Steven Saner <st...@saner.net> KD0IJP
Andover, Kansas USA

[Jason Klein]

Nate,

Good point.  AWS servers do not receive a static IP address by default.  You must go to the “Elastic IP” menu under EC2 and click “Allocate New Address” to setup a permanent static IP. Otherwise, you will have a temporary IP that changes each time you shutdown the server.  The “Elastic IP” is tied to your account and can be moved to any server in your account in just a few seconds, which is nice for server upgrades.

The static IP is free as long as the server is always running, but be aware that they DO charge if you want to keep the static IP while the server is turned off. I deleted a server and forgot to delete the static IP. The unused static IP cost me about $4 that month.

Jason

[Jason Klein]

Hosted virtual servers at Rack Space, Digital Ocean, Amazon, Google, Azure, etc are usually available as bare installs of your OS of choice (Debian, CentOS, etc).  You have full root access to the server and are responsible for installing the packages you need, configuring the system, and keeping up on OS updates.  If you don’t want to setup everything from scratch, some hosts will offer a very basic web-based control panel option for free, or a very nice web-based commercial control panel for a small fee.

The virtual servers are meant to be up and running 24/7 and their performance is usually good to excellent. Some of the lower cost hosts will oversubscribe their hardware too much.  As a result, performance can be spotty at times. You can check reviews for a specific host to determine if performance is a common issue.

Jason