Hosting own wesbite(s) and email server (NA)

EdFred

EdFred

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First, not asking which place I should host.

The current setup I have is sunsetting/ed.

I want to keep the email and the websites in house. As in on my own hardware. Not AWS, not goDaddy, not the evil G, not out in Washington state. In the room next to my desk.

So what's the best - with an easy to interface/configure with Win10/MSOffice boxes also on the network set up for that right now?

I'm taking the under of 5 before someone suggests I don't host.
 
I'm sorry, you didn't put (NA) in your thread title so I'll just say GoGo
 
With all the various anti-spam mitigation in use, it's become increasingly difficult to run a (useful) email server on your own. Are you on a static IP and can you control your rDNS (will your carrier serve your rDNS or delegate it to you)? If not, most providers won't accept mail from your mail server.

Web hosting is easy, mail hosting isn't hard, it's just a pain to get all the pieces in place so that other services will accept mail from you.

And I'm not exactly suggesting you don't self host, just wondering if you have all the pieces in place to do so.
 
Ryan Klems said:
With all the various anti-spam mitigation in use, it's become increasingly difficult to run a (useful) email server on your own. Are you on a static IP and can you control your rDNS (will your carrier serve your rDNS or delegate it to you)? If not, most providers won't accept mail from your mail server.

Web hosting is easy, mail hosting isn't hard, it's just a pain to get all the pieces in place so that other services will accept mail from you.

And I'm not exactly suggesting you don't self host, just wondering if you have all the pieces in place to do so.
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I've been hosting web and email for 10+years. Small outfit. Less than 10 users, so we went with SBS behind a linux firewall, but a lot of dynamic web pages that change on the hour or less, so hosting elsewhere is not really great for us. I'm not going to manually upload crap every hour when it does it automatically as I process it during the day.

My spam email is less than 5 a day. My quarantine catches A LOT, and I go in every few days and wipe it clean.
 
Last time I did this (which has been awhile) I used a linux distro configured as an email server. But as has been noted above, setting up one is pretty easy, getting others to accept email from it is getting harder very day. I'd also suggest setting whatever you use up as a Virtual Machine (which you can do on your own hardware) for ease of killing it and standing it back up when it gets 1) Hacked, 2) generally to messed up to bother with. A clean image start is way faster than trying to build it over and/or restore from backups. Keep the data stores separate and backed up.

I used a SuSE distro last time (I think) but I've no idea what's current.
 
I was going to suggest to find an ancient copy of SBS 2008 ;-)

If you dont have a problem getting your emails accepted now, you probably wont have that problem going forward. You must have made it on enough trusted lists to be considered harmless.

I am sure there is an open source linux solution for your project, there is one for anything.

You could also check with Red River networks, I hear they are experts at this. Comes with a can of bleach-bit to boot.
 
Yep, the first thing is to check whether your ISP is blocking port 25. If it is, you're going to have a problem with email unless you bounce it off another provider. THe next step is what you expose to the internet. I'd certainly want a good firewall either in the router itself, or something like afw or ufw. There are three major Linux mail systems now: sendmail (ugh), exim, and procmail. For webservers apache and nginx. Barring know just what web and mail services your require kind of limits my suggestions. Frankly, I'd skip trying to use a Microsoft server product. The windows mail programs (I punted on Outlook, sucking to much, and switched to EMClient on both Mac and Windows now) all can use IMAP.
 
Where did I say I'm having servers having issues accepting my email? I never stated that.

I've been running without issue for 10 plus years. I don't have an issue with the server other than SBS is no longer being supported.
 
What are you looking for advice on besides either standing up a new Server 2019 box or trying to migrate your SBS to 2019? It sounds like you’ve already got a setup you like and don’t want to reinvent the wheel here.
 
bluesky74656 said:
What are you looking for advice on besides either standing up a new Server 2019 box or trying to migrate your SBS to 2019? It sounds like you’ve already got a setup you like and don’t want to reinvent the wheel here.
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The nice thing about SBS was that it all came at a good price in a neat little bundle. Until you have Serverr 2019, SQL, Outlook-Server and all the other bits and pieces, you are going contribute a fair amount of coin to Bill Gates earth domination plans.
 
I do this, but on a server colocated in Los Angeles. It's my hardware, I have remote access and remote hands if I need them. I'm also my own tech support when things get weird.

If I was doing this at home, I'd probably want a "business" ISP account so that they are reluctant to randomly shut off ports on you, or some intern classifies you as a P2P or spammer or other "no no" item for a home account. It will be about 2x cost for the same thing you get now. In theory you're paying for a goon to call and yell at when they F things up. They will F things up.

Email isn't so hard, but it is a periodic nuisance. I use mailinabox for it.

I'd also want a dedicated box for the hosting, so my workstation was clear of it. It needn't be powerful, but mirrored storage and a mittful of RAM would be my priorities, with a view to keeping the thing running for 5-10 years without much need for servicing. One of the baby dell poweredge T series should fit the bill great, but you could run this stuff on a Raspberry Pi if you really wanted to. :D
 
This is at my office, on a business ISP account with static IP. Has been for 10+ years.
 
This is targeted toward a cloud box, but there's no reason you couldn't deploy it on your own server that I can see.

https://mailinabox.email/
 
weilke said:
The nice thing about SBS was that it all came at a good price in a neat little bundle. Until you have Serverr 2019, SQL, Outlook-Server and all the other bits and pieces, you are going contribute a fair amount of coin to Bill Gates earth domination plans.
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Yep. Cheap, fast or easy, pick any one.

When I had a home web server for some of my hobby stuff I installed Linux on an old desktop, but half of its purpose was to teach me Linux so I didn’t mind spending a bunch of time on it and it wasn’t professional.

In a previous life I deployed a few SBS boxes for clients. I think it’s gone away because the people at whom it was targeted Microsoft would like to see just move entirely to the cloud.

So for Ed’s case he’s ruled out the cloud. He’s also expressed a preference for Easy. He might be the type that could setup a Linux web and mail server and call it easy, or at least be willing to do the hard setup once and let it run.

Or, you fork over the money to MS to run their stuff on your hardware. Even then ‘easy’ might be a stretch, but if you’ve got experience with SBS then configuring IIS and Exchange will be more familiar than configuring whatever stack you decide to run on Linux.
 
bluesky74656 said:
In a previous life I deployed a few SBS boxes for clients. I think it’s gone away because the people at whom it was targeted Microsoft would like to see just move entirely to the cloud.
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Yeah, why sell someone a piece of software for $1600 if you can charge them $16/month/user for eternity.

Or, you fork over the money to MS to run their stuff on your hardware. Even then ‘easy’ might be a stretch, but if you’ve got experience with SBS then configuring IIS and Exchange will be more familiar than configuring whatever stack you decide to run on Linux.
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Probably true. I have a gaggle of MS servers and begrudgingly I have to admit that Server 2019 is better than the earlier versions. You dont HAVE to be fluent with the command line interface to get things done, the various GUI tools actually work ;-)
 
EdFred said:
So what's the best - with an easy to interface/configure with Win10/MSOffice boxes also on the network set up for that right now?
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Doesn’t exist. Not anything that’s properly maintainable in today’s world anyway, without a small army or more hours in a day than you have available.
 
I was using FreeBSD and Linux in a similar experience fashion with the servers in my office. Worked fine with IMAP, though I am using an add-in to Outlook to handle the calendar/contacts. Apache was a little more challenging with dynamic updates, but in the end worked fine. Static IP, Port 25 open, RDNS served by the ISP, but they grabbed it an updated it from my box.

Cable Company ISP became more challenging to deal with through a couple of outages - including trying to charge me for a problem on the pole. Enough downtime that a couple of business emails were lost. Add in the hassle of handling certificates and the reduced validity time of same and I threw in the towel. I'm using 3 different outsource providers now: one for email, one for my photo website, and one for my business &a personal website. Still have more downtime than I should, but no more lost business and business contacts - I can access email in an emergency mode through a mobile hotspot. I loved the total control in-house, but it became more of a hassle than it was worth. I rented a Linode for a while as a backup solution but gave that up when I outsourced. Disappointed that it came to this, but between the spammers/scammers/malware idiots and the big companies forcing the hands of the small guy it's where I ended up.

As Nate's said, there's no really good solution. SBS may be as close as you can get.
 
Check out Domain Name System (DNS) | Oracle. They bought dyndns.com, which is a dns service. Basically you can use a modification of one of their standard names, which they will point to your IP address. I use it for personal use, I have synology diskstation which will probably do what you want. You can also buy a domain name, and this service will point it to your IP address. It's good stuff, let's you use your own hardware rather than having a host, but I'm no expert.


This gets you to the dns trial, used to be free, but now they charge, still very cheap IMO.

https://account.dyn.com/
 
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PaulS said:
Check out Domain Name System (DNS) | Oracle. They bought dyndns.com, which is a dns service. Basically you can use a modification of one of their standard names, which they will point to your IP address. I use it for personal use, I have synology diskstation which will probably do what you want. You can also buy a domain name, and this service will point it to your IP address. It's good stuff, let's you use your own hardware rather than having a host, but I'm no expert.


This gets you to the dns trial, used to be free, but now they charge, still very cheap IMO.

https://account.dyn.com/
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You can't use dynamic DNS with properly configured mail servers. SPF/DKIM etc etc etc. Static.
 
EdFred said:
SBS is what has sunsetted.
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Welcome to the brave new software rental world!
7c9fd54a075f510aa46712e0b24fc550.jpg
 
EdFred said:
I've been hosting web and email for 10+years. Small outfit. Less than 10 users, so we went with SBS behind a linux firewall, but a lot of dynamic web pages that change on the hour or less, so hosting elsewhere is not really great for us. I'm not going to manually upload crap every hour when it does it automatically as I process it during the day.

My spam email is less than 5 a day. My quarantine catches A LOT, and I go in every few days and wipe it clean.
Click to expand...
I have set up several external websites to update many times a day, automatically. We hosted our own "back in the day", until one day it was cheaper and easier not to.
I'm glad I'm completely out of that rat-race.
 
denverpilot said:
Welcome to the brave new software rental world!
7c9fd54a075f510aa46712e0b24fc550.jpg
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Ya never owned the software, anyway. Just a license to a version that was likely out-of-date the minute you got it. We've calculated that subscriptions cost us about the same as periodic upgrades (very large corporate climate), and I do it for some items (Adobe products) at home, if I use them a bunch. The idea of leasing software is only about sixty years old, anyway.
 
Kenny Phillips said:
Ya never owned the software, anyway. Just a license to a version that was likely out-of-date the minute you got it. We've calculated that subscriptions cost us about the same as periodic upgrades (very large corporate climate), and I do it for some items (Adobe products) at home, if I use them a bunch. The idea of leasing software is only about sixty years old, anyway.
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I own plenty of software. Vast majority of the internet runs on GPL software too.

And having spoken with them, Adobe higher ups are some of the largest azzholes on the planet.
 
For my professional business I use "PLESK" (not free, not affiliated). It is a all-in-one with a webpanel, but not sure if they have anything for msoffice.
 
Plesk is just an expensive and poorly written web front end to completely free software. Been popular in the fast food low end hosting business for decades.

Anything plesk can do a mid tier sysadmin can do better. But not as cheap.

Beat analogy I can give is it’s the Microsoft Bob of the web server world.

Only thing worse than plesk is Wordpress. Or managing Wordpress from plesk.

If plesk is Microsoft Bob, Wordpress is meeting the burglar at the front door and handing them a crowbar for their convenience. Haha.
 
denverpilot said:
I own plenty of software. Vast majority of the internet runs on GPL software too.

And having spoken with them, Adobe higher ups are some of the largest azzholes on the planet.
Click to expand...

I can believe that.
 
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