Hello. Again I need your advise.
I have dns registration, Web Site hosting and email support at Host Europe which is becoming a no go for me as they switch to MS365 for email serving.
As a result I want to do 2 things:
host my website locally on my raspberry (no problem) and redirect the DNS registration.
Have a new email provider which supports my custom domains.
I have done some research and mailbox.org and tutanota among others offer these services.
However, these solutions feels rather expensive or a bit complicated to be implemented.
Can you give recommendations on what works well with this request?
I register my domains on inwx, host them on uberspace, backup to hetzner, and do email via mailbox. For the lot of it, I pay something like €15 per month, which I find reasonable. And all of it happens in Germany.
If I’d change anything, it’d probably be mailbox, as the web-interface is a bit clunky, it doesn’t really support two-factor authentication, and it’s nigh-on impossible to share calendars with other people. But I don’t know what I’d change it to. Posteo wasn’t any better when I tried it a few years ago. Maybe proton? I haven’t tried that yet. But not to complain, mailbox does work well, and reliably. Just not quite as slick as I’d like. You might not care at all if you’re not using the web interface much.
I register my domain on cloudflare. I like it because of all the free protection features they provide and I use them as proxy as well. Price is more or less the same as in other places.
For email I use Fastmail, but might change once my membership ends (next year).
4 services? And 15 per month.
That sounds complicated and expensive. But it seems possible to create something that works.
Not exactly what I had in mind. I would prefer 1 service that does everything for something like 5 per month. Ionos does that but they cost like 8 per month and have no privacy out of the box like with tutanota.
There are combined hosting and email and registrar services, like Jimdo or Squarespace. But, I have migrated services on all of these four at least once in the last decade. This was easy to do, as they all do one well-defined thing.
In contrast, if your Jimdo website breaks, there are no Jimdo-compatible services. You’ll have to start from scratch.
To each their own, if course. I also fully understand if hobby sysadmin is not your idea of a fun time.
I am happy with manitu.de for webhosting and e-mail. Even the smallest package for 2,50 Euro/month offers PHP, MariaDBs, ssh access etc… No complaints and problems so far. In addition, I started last month to pay for Nextcloud on Hetzner for files, calendars and contacts. All together for <10 Euro including a de domain.
gandi for domains - because back when i did a comparison of all the services: easy dnssec + 2FA was hard to find as combination.
protonmail + self hosted mail - accounts are used for different purposes.
rest still self hosted.
Also one thing to keep in mind when you look at pricing for things. what has a proper family plan so you can have multiple people on one plan and e.g. share calendars with them.
I’m using cloud flare for domain and tunnel to my home server. I bought a beelink ser5 mini PC a while back. I self host in podman containers nextcloud, cloud flare tunnel and you can just host anything you want. I do have a fiber connection at home, so upload/download are not an issue.
I only pay for the annual domain fees, the backblaze backup ($1.50/month) and energy for the mini PC (trivial).
How do you do that? My impression from self-hosted mail servers is that this does not work as they become blacklisted very soon.
Or is my understanding wrong? What do you use proton for if you use your own mail-server?
my very minimalistic research came up with:
inwx - 4 € / year + 19 USD for SSL
gandi 9 € / year + 0 USD for SSL (maybe 25 every following year, not clear)
Serious email accounts seem always to be around 3 € / month / user.
I considered something similar. And have also some home lab staff running on an old Surface Go for testing. However, my impression was that if you have <2 TB of data, cloud solutions are similar priced, if you consider hardware and repair costs - and it looks tidy at home . And, not everybody wants to be a admin. But it can be fun (… and a rabbit hole…) to host services yourself.
When I researched prices a while back, 100GB was the breaking point. Most cloud services had decent price until 100GB, then they force you into the 1TB plan. I had at the time 150GB. I have pretty much everything running without issues or a need of an admin. I dont let the server do any auto updates. I have a script that I run when I’m home. I like to make sure everything is working, hence only do manual updates. I normally do a full reboot to test the system going back into normal production too.
I just moved my last domain off Gandi. The prices have become ridiculous since they were sold - more than 30€ for a .eu domain They used to be great, though.
So right now I have domains with OVH, Namecheap and Cloudflare.
I think there might be a case recommending Hosting UK for people in northern Europe because they are happy to provide the open source let’s encrypt, seem to me fairly Linux based and good value financially though more suitable for techies
However I am aware that I don’t know too much on the subject
I use plusnet for my broadband and got a static IP and managed to get off blacklists for business emails with email addresses based on the hosting UK websites rather than @plusnet however after a while they end up getting blacklisted again
I don’t have a problem with Plusnet because it is not a business service and is cheap
set up the domain according to their instructions at my old domain provider (MX record etc),
once that works, transfer the domain to the new domain provider (if applicable).
I am not sure where home hosted services come in. Unless you have a very reliable connection and/or very special needs (huge data, but don’t mind downtimes) I would not host at home.
. And, not everybody wants to be a admin. But it can be fun (… and a rabbit hole…) to host services yourself.
They used to be great, though.