Moving my email server off DigitalOcean

When I deployed my email server with DigitalOcean five years back, it delivered at a competitive price and performance. A few years later, the same server has gotten a price hike but no upgrades or resource increases. Even so, hosting your email server is not for the faint of heart, and IP reputation is a big part of the game. Therefore, I stayed with DigitalOcean until the depletion of resources finally forced my hand.

Server cost and resources

I enjoy squeezing out the maximum value from a minimum of dollars so I ran the email server on a basic droplet. It’s a far cry from any recommended server specification for email hosting, but it was reliable.

I looked into resizing my droplet to add more RAM and disk space, but doubling memory and storage on this droplet would also double the price. I don’t want to spend 12$ per month on what I still consider a minimal configuration.

Getting the most bang for your bucks

I wanted to host my server with a serious and reliable provider that could offer the same stability I enjoyed with DigitalOcean. After doing some research I ended up with a company where I was an existing customer.

Contabo is a German hosting provider with great deals on virtual private servers. My new email server is hosted by its entry-level Cloud VPS 1.

Contabo allows inbound and outbound traffic on email ports, over both IPv4 and IPv6.

A new email server with zero reputation

After remote syncing the data from my old email server, I was ready to figure out how much of an issue mail deliverability would be when starting with a fresh IP address. To my great surprise, the Axis of Evil (Microsoft, Google, and Apple) all accepted my messages, even without slapping a spam label on them.

Maybe the tech giants feel they killed off decentralized email and no longer need to bother with the outliers.

A note on Contabo

Contabo might have the best price-to-performance ratio, but they do not have the most feature-rich and user-friendly control panel. If you know what you’re doing that’s not an issue. If not, then maybe it’s not the best fit for your needs.

Future migrations

The only US-based hosting provider I still have servers with is Vultr. Vultr is slightly more affordable when compared to DigitalOcean, but I believe it’s time to relocate to Germany.