[talk] Hosting Recommendations - email/web

[Charles Sprickman]

> On May 6, 2018, at 10:17 PM, Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> In my capacity as a volunteer/director at a political group out here in NJ, I’m trying to work on getting us setup with something better than what’s in place right now (a random Endurance Group hoster).
> 
> Cost is a huge concern (non-profit).
> 
> We have about 100 mailboxes.
> 
> We have one main site that sees most of the traffic and about 30 that see very little traffic.  All are WordPress and that’s not changing anytime soon.

Wow, so thanks for all the info.  A few things are becoming clear…

- While you can rent a small, reliable VPS for like $1/month, hosting that includes “unlimited” mailboxes for $10/month, actual email-only hosting really doesn’t dip below about $2/month and this price does not seem to be dropping in relation to other hosted servicdes.

- Everyone likes Fastmail. :)

- Dedicated WordPress hosting gets expensive since most billing plans seem to use the number of sites rather than transfer/traffic as the main metric

Where I’m currently at with this is that I’m leaning strongly towards an unmanaged VPS for the web portion.  I enjoy maintaining that sort of thing and I think I get a bit more control over the performance of the sites this way.  If I were to go with managed hosting, the only suggestion that really looks affordable would be SiteGround.  I’m so far happy with other things hosted on Vultr VPSs, so that or Digital Ocean are two known quantities.  Some hosting operations also throw in the “unlimited” email plans with their own VPS/“Cloud” options.  I was looking at Dreamhost and that’s an option, but the email service is an unknown as far as reliability is concerned.

For email, I’m basically looking at three options.  The current host (BlueHost) is pretty awful for hosting (yay for 10 second page loads), but I have an email account configured for IMAP on four of my devices and haven’t seen any burps in that service. I could downgrade this to their cheapest package and just keep the email parked there.  Second is in my VPS shopping, continue looking for a hosting operation that has decent service and just adds their standard “unlimited email” service.  Third is to look at the state of email-in-a-box setups like iredmail and see if that’s an option for self-hosting.  My concern there is that storage on most VPS providers gets expensive fast and I don’t even yet see a way to estimate my actual email storage usage with the current host.

So if I may continue with the questions…

- Any VPS providers you’ve worked with and like that are run by a traditional hosting firm?
- Any open source email “suites” that you like?

Also regarding non-profit status - actually 501(c)4 groups like the one I’m a member of are truly non-profit.  I believe a 527 (a “PAC”) is as well.  Unclear on “Super PACs”.  The reason that most places won’t give you a discount has less to do with the fact that the group is political it’s that if we were a 501(c)3, then companies could call their donations/discounts a tax-deductible contribution and write that off.  Contributions to other non-profits are not tax-deductible.  At least that’s how I understand all this.

Thanks again, I really appreciate all the feedback.

Charles