Sure we could half-arse things and run cheaper, but that's not the business we're in. We provide a high quality product, and we truly believe we're worth it. No apologies for that price, it's quite reasonable for the value we provide.
The rest of your post is fine, but don't say this when pitching your product because value is entirely in the eye of the customer.
We have made a conscious choice that we aren't going to chase after the really price sensitive customer.
We're OK with not having those customers. If price is your ONLY deciding factor, then FastMail isn't for you, because we'll never be the cheapest option. You can't compete with free if you don't have another funding source to subsidise the product.
And we don't: all our income comes from selling our service, so we can't compete on price alone. We have to compete on quality, features and execution.
I wound up moving this paragraph deep into the blog post because it wasn't the point of the post - but it is one of my key driving principles:
"Our goal is to solve your email needs as quickly as possible so you can get on with everything else in your life."
We don't want to keep our customers' eyeballs on our site longer than the minimum required to achieve their goals.
If you want to play the premium price game, you better be able to back it up with a good customer experience, and Fastmail does. That's why you see so many positive comments in any discussion of email.
BUT. The ongoing faff and arsing about and maintenance isn't fun. If I didn't have many, many accounts for me and other people on my servers, I'd have migrated to FastMail a long time ago.
I'm working on a guide on how to setup a replicated fault tolerant email cluster (galera/dsync) here [1] -- feedback appreciated.
This costs far more than something like fastmail, however. Depending on your situation you might value cost over peace of mind.
1: https://medium.com/@cyberpunk_networks/nsa-proof-your-email-...
Unfortunately, with Galera, you're not even a hardware failure away from losing / corrupting email.
https://aphyr.com/posts/327-jepsen-mariadb-galera-cluster
> Unfortunately, even in totally healthy clusters, with no node failures or network failures, Galera Cluster does not satisfy its claims of Snapshot Isolation.
I'll add a section on recovery, but even with a few hundred thousand email inboxes my database size is likely to be under 100mb and backing that up will cause no issues in live since I'm only doing SELECT 99.99% of the time; each of my nodes dumps the db into /var somewhere every hour.
The Mastodon instance I use is hosted at Scaleway. It's had multiple multi-day outages due to failures at Scaleway's end.
Cheap is great and all, but this experience has not been the kind that would lead me to recommend using Scaleway for any service you need to be reliable.
the comparable offer from google is also $5