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January 2018

26 participants
11 discussions

AWC EC2 queries vs self hosting and other options for a email services
by Andrew McGlashan 02 Jan '18

02 Jan '18

Hi Guys/Gals, As I understand it, if you want to host an AWS EC2 server, you need to pay a "region" price for access to a region; it is my belief that it costs roughly $1500 per month, not sure if that is already in AUD or not. Then, you pay per hour for the running machine and you pay again (even if only a little) for storage. To me, self-hosting a mail server makes much more sense; so, why would it make sense to set one up as an AWS EC2 instance? Have I got the figures wrong? Is that region charge an every month "once off" and then you can have as many servers there as you like? Even if you pay for every server by the hour plus other costs? I know they [AWS] have an offer of 1 year free, but that translates to me as a fremium product; you'll pay through the nose after 12 months if you continue to require the service. The only other alternative to self hosting is a VPS, then you are RAM, CPU and storage limited, that is, unless you really pay for a beefed up server, and, of course, that will cost you dearly. A cheap self hosted server on a good connection should suffice for email better than any other option. I've ran a mail server on a DSL connection for many years now, it has been improved by an HFC NBN connection for me, but it worked okay on DSL even if it wasn't ideal. There is one other option, but I really loath that choice. That is to use Google Apps or some other hosted service, just for email -- the only advantage I see is the level of storage available. But it comes at a cost of not being able to fully manage the server and the logs and almost everything else that you have with a hosted service; that is, you lose an awful lot of control. And then, if you increase user mailboxes, your costs go up every time. I'm talking about using one or more domain names for email services and not using LookOut (outlook.com) Gmail or any other hosted email. What am I missing? Why do people choose hosted services with all the costs and the negatives? It makes no sense to me, but one client is agitating to remove their very, very low cost server that I mange on their behalf. Your thoughts? Thanks and Kind Regards AndrewM

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