Comment by julienmarie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by julienmarie | Hacker News Reader

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I keep on hearing that hosting your own server is a pain. Email costs were always an issue for me. I manage a few e-commerce website. Initially when they were small I used MailChimp. Then moved to AWS SES. Now I moved to my own self hosted postalserver. My mailing lists are not huge ( 100k recipients) and I send daily and I don't have much of a deliverability issue. Depending on the audience my open rates are between 35 and 55%. What I learned is: - Make sure your configuration is perfect. From reverse dns to DKIM. Everything should be aligned. - Have a clean email list. Validate emails ( MX, etc ), double optin, remove hard bounces, respect unsubscribes to the t ( people don't always unsubscribe using the link, but often just send an email to customer service, provide the option fornthe customer service team to unsubscribe people from marketing). - Use a email warming service like mailreach. It seems weird but it makes a world of difference. It really works. I spend less than $50/month all in all with a beefy instance on Hetzner Cloud. For the volume I send it would cost 6x this on SES.

What you're describing is exactly what most people would call "a pain". It is very doable if it is your job, but it's definitely much much more work than having a Gmail or Proton Mail account or whatever other provider if it's about your own personal email.

There are many who would like to not be beholden to anyone else for their own email, but when they try it, they quickly find it's far too much work to actually ensure that when they send an email to, say, apply for a job, it will certainly arrive.

> There are many who would like to not be beholden to anyone else for their own email, but when they try it, they quickly find it's far too much work to actually ensure that when they send an email to, say, apply for a job, it will certainly arrive.

I think not knowing is a big problem. For example, I just use docker-mailserver on a VPS with decent IP reputation and SPF set up (but not DKIM/DMARC) and haven't really had any issues with the big providers.

However, if there were issues, I wouldn't know about those myself, unless I had some code that sends emails to those providers and then checks whether they've been received periodically.

On one hand, it would be nice to have confirmation for when a mail has been handled successfully (delivered and sitting in their inbox folder, not tossed aside and not filtered as spam, regardless of whether they'll actually read it), but then again some software will also block remote content (like tracking pixels) over justified privacy concerns and bad actors would also benefit from said functionality.

> $50/month all in all with a beefy instance on Hetzner Cloud

That's really small amount per month but for 100K a day you can use almost any extremely low-end VPS

Where do you host your mailserver?

They stated that they host it on a dedicated server rented from the provider Hetzner.

Actual a "beefy instance" on Hetzner not clear it's dedicated

$50 a month is almost certainly not dedicated.

$50 a month will absolutely rent you a pretty great dedicated server:

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex €46.41 ($50.10 USD) rents you a single physical computer with a i5-13500 CPU, 64 GB DDR4, 2 x 512 GB NVMe SSDs.

If you want cheap dedicated servers, you can get even lower prices (though the value may not be as good): SoYouStart (OVH but in North America) has $30 dedicated servers[0], OVH in France has dedicated servers (Intel Atom tier, but still your own whole computer) for $11 a month[1].

[0] - https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/

[1] - https://eco.us.ovhcloud.com/#filterType=range_element&filter...

In the world of dedicated, you can get so much more vs what you'd pay for the equivalent EC2 instance.

I stand corrected.

Thank you for the information.

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