Alternatives for outbound email service

[Dan Ritter]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 06:12:47PM -0400, Rich Braun wrote:
> Acquaintances have told me that Amazon EC2's pricing has dropped considerably,
> and a quick check of their site shows that for $54/year one can get a "micro
> reserved instance" which is 613MB of RAM plus ten cents/month/GB for storage,
> so a 10GB partition (more than needed for a mail relay) would be $12/year. 
> That's a price I could live with though the price list is daunting and I
> suspect those would not be the only line items on the bill.

Hours of runtime and GB of transfer in each direction are the
line items you're missing. It won't be huge, but it does exist.

> So, if I follow John's suggestion and actually purchase a colo mail server,
> how do I keep the cost down under, say, $100/year?  (The obvious alternative
> is to buy commercial-grade home ISP service, which is unnecessary and frankly
> the home email server is a luxury that I don't really need but prefer to keep
> for the sake of principle--it's something I've had since the "old days" of the
> Internet when all these restrictions and costs didn't exist.)

The classic method is to get a few completely trustworthy friends together
and get a machine together.

A $40/month Linode virtual machine (1 GB RAM, 32GB storage, 400GB/month
bandwidth), plus backup for $10/month, is an annual cost of $600. This
will easily support the mail load of any six people: spam filtering,
IMAP/SSL, and some non-slashdotted web pages. If you had ten trustworthy
friends, the price would drop to $60/year each. Any more than that,
and I think you're straining the bonds of trust more than the machine
would likely be taxed.

Note that it probably costs you around $200/year in electricity
to keep a non-sleeping machine running 24/7. 

-dsr-




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