On Tuesday, 2 January 2018 12:19:26 AM AEDT Andrew McGlashan via luv-main wrote:
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.
For a mail server you want an "elastic IP", that is an IP address that's permanently reserved for you. It's free while you have an instance using it and you pay a reservation fee whenever you aren't using it (which is almost never for a mail server).
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?
https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver Linode is generally good. But in a later message you say you need 200G+ of storage. For that Hetzner has a better offer, E39 per month for a server with 2*4TB disks. That has 32G of RAM so it will run ZFS or BTRFS nicely, I've run ZFS on Hetzner servers before, but I'm using BTRFS now.
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.
No they are actually quite reasonable about that. But the 1 year of free service is for a micro instance (1G of RAM and 5G of S3). It really won't do the job for you.
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.
https://www.hetzner.com/sb No, Hetzner is quite affordable. If you want something really cheap they have "Server Bidding" which is a reverse auction. They have old servers (ones that previous customers cancelled but which aren't worth throwing out) and reduce the offered price until someone buys. Currently the cheapest is E26 per month for a system with 2*300G of storage and 2G of RAM. But that's not a great deal, another is E31 per month for 2*3TB of storage and 16G of RAM. That would run a nice virtual server. You could run ZFS/BTRFS in the Dom0 and then run a few VMs on it. https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/IP-Adressen/en Hetzner charges just under E1 per month for extra IP addresses. If you were to rent the E31 server and provide VMs to 3 friends then you would be each paying E9 per month and getting ~700G of storage and ~3G of RAM. That's a way better deal than getting your own Linode instance, but relies on finding people to share with you. As an aside the LUV VM is on a Hetzner server. The system has 2*256G SSD, 2*2TB HDD, and 48G of RAM. I can't remember the price but I think it was something like E35 on Server Bidding which is a great deal if you want some fast storage for VM images as well as some big storage for large files. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/