Hi. Some friends of mine are starting a business and they want to setup a server to host a simple “contact” website, run an e-mail service (about 10 accounts for now but with possibilities of expanding it to support more) and to store and remote access documents.
Im a computer savvy person so they asked me for help, but dont know much about self-hosting so I come here asking you:
What kind of hardware do they need and would be best?
What OS and other software is required and recomended?
How to set it up/configure it? Im partial to foss but if there are good propietary options they are acceptable too.
And last: What do we have to watch out for or avoid.
Also, space is a bit of an issue, I was thinking they could use something small like an intel nuc but Im worried that hardware would be underpowered for their needs.
I have been googling for stuff myself but I get overwhelmed by the ammount of information and some contradicting opinions so I appreciate your recomendations and guidance. Im not asking you to give me a full tutorial, although I would appreciate it too, but just to be pointed in the right direction to avoid, as much as possible, spending money and time on things they might not really need or might not perform as well.
Thanks in advance.
We, selfhosters and sysadmins alike, need to change our tune around the position of “do not self host email.” It only serves to keep email in the grip of big tech. Yes it is difficult and someone without any experience shouldn’t start there but it is definitely manageable and not nearly as hard as it is made out to be.
There are multiple email “distributions” nowadays making the software stack set up and maintenance effectively an exercise in running a regular Linux distro upgrade. Mailinabox and mailcow to name two off the top of my head.
The DNS records are relatively straightforward to set up and validate with these mail distros, they basically tell you what to put and provide ways of validating you did what they said you should. There are also many ways to test that you set them up properly by having a service validate them via email you send to the testing service, e.g. mail-tester.com and dmarctester.com, finally DMARC has a report function builtin so you can get regular delivery reports that come directly from the servers that are choosing what to do with your email giving you a clear signal when there are problems.
You don’t have to jump into hard mode around a clean IP either you can offload that for a nominal fee to an email service provider if you don’t want to try your luck, e.g. MXroute.com has a one time fee for multiple domains.
Yes email is convulted and confusing at times and scary to host given how essential it is but I’d encourage anyone with the time and desire to do it.
Self hosting email is a huge pain. I wouldn’t personally recommend it. In many ways it sucks but that’s the world we live in.
Right you said that above and that is what resulted in my larger response. Reiterating without any more information doesn’t really change your position in a tangible way. I appreciate that is your stance and many others’ stance. I think we need to encourage the opposite to change the landscape of the internet.
Except you haven’t talked about the key problem with mail servers, reliability. When you host a mail server there are so many things that can go wrong. Everything from the hardware to the software becomes a potential point of failure. And that doesn’t even include the issues with your IP getting flagged. Be ready to have your emails either be blocked or go straight to spam. That’s fine for a hobby project but I wouldn’t self host your main email. You are just shooting yourself in the foot.
As it turns out email is just way to easy to abuse. You can self host a Matrix or Simplex server if you want easy federated communications.
I have been hosting my mail server for over 10 years. You need to study dkim, dmark and all the other stuff, but it can be done indeed and its not scary at all.