AWC EC2 queries vs self hosting and other options for a email services
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
Andrew McGlashan via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> writes:
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.
Where did you get this information from? I am not familiar with this fee. Nor can I find anything about it: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ -- Brian May <brian@linuxpenguins.xyz> https://linuxpenguins.xyz/brian/
On 02/01/18 09:47, Brian May via luv-main wrote:
Andrew McGlashan via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> writes:
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.
Where did you get this information from? I am not familiar with this fee. Nor can I find anything about it:
Okay, the problem pricing may be related to "Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances" ... that seems the closest (from what I can tell), to having your own physical server and being able to do with it what you like. Perhaps this product is way overkill. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/dedicated-instances/ <quote> Pricing Pay only for what you use with no long-term commitments. Dedicated Instance pricing has two components: (1) an hourly per instance usage fee and (2) a dedicated per region fee (note that you pay this once per hour regardless of how many Dedicated Instances you're running). Dedicated Per Region Fee $2 per hour - An additional fee is charged once per hour in which at least one Dedicated Instance of any type is running in a region. </quote> This region fee, $2 per hour, approx. 750 hours per month, so about $1,500. I also find that all (or too many, if not all) AWS pages are super resource hungry and cause performance issues (that is, their website pages detailing the products on offer). This may be due to me using Palemoon -- which is a fork of Firefox; I actually use a combination of browsers, Firefox [due to how they have changed since version 57 in particular], is used much less by myself now. -- Kind Regards AndrewM
Andrew McGlashan via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> writes:
Okay, the problem pricing may be related to "Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances" ... that seems the closest (from what I can tell), to having your own physical server and being able to do with it what you like.
Perhaps this product is way overkill.
If I am reading that correctly, sounds like you get exclusive access to the hardware. i.e. not a VM. So, probably will cost more. Last I looked, the reserved instance stuff was the cheapest. Although was somewhat confusing for me to understand initially, and I had to complain to Amazon when their website stuffed things up.... IIRC, if you have a reserved instance, then the hourly fees get reduced significantly (but are still payable). So the total payable is less. I think there might have been two types of reserved instances, but I have forgotten this stuff already. Even with the reserved instance, you probably find you will end up paying more then for an alternative provider. At least that is what I found several years ago, when I moved to Hetzner instead.
I also find that all (or too many, if not all) AWS pages are super resource hungry and cause performance issues (that is, their website pages detailing the products on offer). This may be due to me using Palemoon -- which is a fork of Firefox; I actually use a combination of browsers, Firefox [due to how they have changed since version 57 in particular], is used much less by myself now.
No argument here. -- Brian May <brian@linuxpenguins.xyz> https://linuxpenguins.xyz/brian/
Hi Andrew, A server hosted on Amazon EC2 can cost significantly lesser than the $1500 you've arrived at. For example, around 4 servers I manage costs us around ~350AU$ a year. (You can use this page to estimate the cost. http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html) In addition to that Amazon now has introduced a new product called Lightsail for requirements such as yours. (See https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/) Then there is of-course Linode, Digital Ocean, Vultr ... -Manoj.C On Tue, Jan 2, 2018 at 12:19 AM, Andrew McGlashan via luv-main < luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
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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Hi Manoj, On 02/01/18 09:47, Manoj C Menon via luv-main wrote:
A server hosted on Amazon EC2 can cost significantly lesser than the $1500 you've arrived at.
Okay.
For example, around 4 servers I manage costs us around ~350AU$ a year. (You can use this page to estimate the cost. http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html)
The calculator seems to need Firefox for me, it's not loading properly in Palemoon.
In addition to that Amazon now has introduced a new product called Lightsail for requirements such as yours. (See https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/)
The storage limits/options with lightsail seem to be an issue, some of the user's Maildir folders are quite excessive as too many people send/receive very large attachments and keep them in folders long term. There is currently close to 200GB of data storage used in the Maildir folders. So, unless the folders can be significantly culled, 80GB wouldn't be enough.
Then there is of-course Linode, Digital Ocean, Vultr ...
Yes, I still contend that full self-hosting is likely to be the best option, aside from the "push everything to the cloud" mantra/talk that some people feel greatly obliged to follow at any cost. Thanks A.
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/
participants (4)
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Andrew McGlashan -
Brian May -
Manoj C Menon -
Russell Coker