Dedicated

[Shawn Gossman]

Who here has their forum on a dedicated server?

How long have you had it on a dedicated server?

 

[Tracy]

My astro site is currently running on an OVH KimSufi dedicated server. Hardware was above what I could get in a VPS for the same price, and since I have regular backups if the older hardware totally bites the bullet I am out no more than 24 hours of posts.... unless it craps out during the backup generation and transfer itself.

I think I'm paying around $16 a month for it. Unlimited 300Mbps bandwidth and have twice the storage (SSD soft raid), 4 times the RAM and twice the CPU/threads that I did with a Hetzner VPS paying about the same amount.
I've been on it since the last BF sell OVH had. And on the next BF sale, I'll probably grab another one in the next line up and then use the KimSufi one for either the Discourse site or the multiple-nodeBB sites.
But I've played with dedicated servers for around a decade. Mainly to just have, but traffic never justified the cost.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

My astro site is currently running on an OVH KimSufi dedicated server. Hardware was above what I could get in a VPS for the same price, and since I have regular backups if the older hardware totally bites the bullet I am out no more than 24 hours of posts.... unless it craps out during the backup generation and transfer itself.

I think I'm paying around $16 a month for it. Unlimited 300Mbps bandwidth and have twice the storage (SSD soft raid), 4 times the RAM and twice the CPU/threads that I did with a Hetzner VPS paying about the same amount.
I've been on it since the last BF sell OVH had. And on the next BF sale, I'll probably grab another one in the next line up and then use the KimSufi one for either the Discourse site or the multiple-nodeBB sites.
But I've played with dedicated servers for around a decade. Mainly to just have, but traffic never justified the cost.

Is it managed or unmanaged?

Paying that price - I'd assume you have to manage it all yourself, right?

 

[Tracy]

Is it managed or unmanaged?

At $16 a month unmanaged. You can figure on an average of around $50-$70 a month for quality management, and if you don't want to use cPanel, good luck finding someone that does it.

And yes, I've managed all my VPS/dedicated serve instances since I started having sites on the internet. I have used Linux back to the day of the original Slackware release on 3.5" diskette.

I currently have 4 VPS's and the one dedicated server. The largest VPS instance is used as an email server.... and the company surprisingly has clean IP ranges, especially at the price range they are.

Using one of the Edge & Steel mail account:



Using one of the Ideological Central mail account




I personally would never use OVH as a mail server. Way to many of their IP's are in block lists. That is why I had no problems using an OVH server for my website as I knew that I was not going to be delivering mail from it. If you are one that has to use cPanel to administer your site and you also use it to send your mail from it, your mail delivery will most likely be problematic.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I always use Gmal Suite for email. I've found that to be the best way but of course it costs money.

 

[Tracy]

I always use Gmal Suite for email. I've found that to be the best way but of course it costs money.

I use it for my personal email on a domain we have had over 22 years.. but honestly, for use with transactional email it costs more than it is worth.
I would not say it is the "best" way... but it is more easily configured.
I prefer to use either SES (for my primary site and was a REAL pain in the arse to set up) or my mailcow-dockerized installation (as related above) for my other sites for transactional email.
Even on my main site I did use ZoHo for my "normal" email related to the domain and then SES to send only my transactional email content. But I did move the "normal user" emails over to my Mailcow instance since I plan on offering limited email to users once they reach a certain participation point and I did not want to pay ZoHo several dollars a month for every one of those accounts. For about $15 a month I can get enough space to offer a decent offering to those that would like a branded astrowhat.com email account and I can easily increase the storage on that server to offer it to more people. Yes, it costs me in the long run as I do not in any way do advertising/cost recovery currently. But I have actually contemplated offering larger mailboxes to users as a paid upgrade. The only problem I currently have with that is a manual process and I need to price the cost of automating that so that I can reduce the mailbox level in an XF process and relay it to Mailcow to move that users account into a lower tier if they do not maintain their subscription. And then you have the issue of what happens if they were paid and their mailbox is reduced to a smaller one once they leave the paid tier. Do you just keep it "as is" and not accept any additional mail until they delete below their lower current level or what.