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Thinking of setting up a mail server, do I need a 2nd VPS? [affordable suggestions welcome!] (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by AudioBabble@alien.top to c/main@selfhosted.forum
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Hey all, I have a VPS with Hostinger that serves a few websites, very basic stuff, simple blogs or static pages, very low traffic.

At the moment I have 'custom domain' emails set up with Protonmail and also Tutanota. They are mainly for client communication one-to-one, I very rarely if ever do mass mail-outs.

I'm looking into the possibility of setting up a mail server instead, but it seems it's generally not a good idea to run mail server and web server on the same VPS. [-- if anybody thinks there may be exceptions to this, do let me know, because I would still be interested if it's not an entirely bad idea?]

So I'm wondering about a dedicated VPS to run my mail server, but really don't want to pay much.

In order for it to be cost effective (as opposed to just paying for a mail service with multiple custom domains), i'd want a VPS with 3GB ram and 20-30GB storage that doesn't block port 25, for less than $6 per month.

Is this likely? Anyone know of any contenders?

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[–] adamshand@alien.top 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There's no technical problem with running a mail server on the same server as websites. The only concern is simply that web applications are much more likely to have bugs and get hacked than your mail server. If a web app does get hacked, all of your mail is potentially compromised. If you don't care about that, I'd say ... go for it.

[–] rnimmer@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

you should be using containers though

[–] adamshand@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I like using containers, but it doesn't make any difference to the above. Containers can be exploited as well.

[–] micseydel@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Email is one of the few things I wouldn't personally self-host, because hosts like gmail may silently drop your emails with there being literally nothing you can do about it.

[–] adamshand@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't know why people feel the need to say this every time somebody asks about selfhosting email.

[–] micseydel@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Because hosts like gmail will silently drop your emails and there's nothing you can do about it. I linked to a source.

Can someone help me understand the downvotes? Why would I not warn people about this? Am I mistaken?

[–] lesigh@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

You absolutely could run both on the same machine. What matters most is the quality of the IP and how you configure the server

[–] blind_guardian23@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If you have the knowledge its fine, if not it wont be fun. mailcow ist the best overall package i have seen.

[–] AudioBabble@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks -- mailcow looks good.

What I'm struggling to find good info on is how to get a web server (based on apache2) and mailcow (based on ngix/docker) running happily alongside.

I'm no expert but I do understand the web server side of things.

I had a go with iRedMail via this tutorial: https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/email-server-debian-11-iredmail

^^ but that hijacked my whole server so it became just a mail server and stopped serving web. It's a shame because the tutorial was pretty comprehensive and just the sort of thing I need!

[–] blind_guardian23@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Official doc is here: https://docs.mailcow.email/post_installation/reverse-proxy/r_p-nginx/ (ngnix is a more common choice for reverse Proxy). would recommend using only one service per vps (unless you're really on budget), activate Backup/snapshots.

[–] AudioBabble@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Well folks, it certainly seems like hosting both email and mail server on the same VPS is possible.

The trouble I'm having is that, because I'm not terribly well clued in about mail server admin, I really need a step-by-step tutorial to make setting it up a realistic possibility, but... thusfar I've been unable to really find such a thing.

What I have found are plenty of guides for setting up a standalone mailserver, and so I'm looking at the daunting task of modifying what they tell me to do, while still managing to serve my websites.

At the moment, my biggest hurdle is I keep coming up against:

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname mail.your-domain.com

-- correct me if I'm wrong, but this is going to change my hostname so that I no longer have a hostname for web?

Seems I need an FQDM for hosting a mail server, but at the same time I also need an FQDM for serving websites.

How do I do both? I'm running Apache2 if that helps...