I have only one domain, and I am currently deploying ISPConfig on a 2vCPU/4GB VPS (Ubuntu) with mail service, web service and database service enabled. I don't really need any other websites on the server except ISPConfig, Rspamd and Webmail. My main use is e-mail. The number of users is very small, currently 13, and in the future up to 20 or less. The number of emails per day is less than 50. Current resource utilization: CPU is usually 0, RAM is usually 2GB, maybe firewall, virus scanning or something like that. I have one question. 1. redundancy I read "ISPConfig Perfect Multiserver setup on Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian 10" host FQDN IP panel panel.example.com 10.0.64.12 web01 web01.example.com 10.0.64.13 mx1 mx1.example.com 10.0.64.14 mx2 mx2.example.com 10.0.64.15 ns1 ns1.example.com 10.0.64.16 ns2 ns2.example.com 10.0.64.17 webmail webmail.example.com 10.0.64.18 It looks like it will take 7 VPS to make it work. What I would like is to have redundancy for email sending and receiving, for cost reasons. If my current server is mx1, I would like to add 1 VPS as mx2. What are your suggestions? For example, would something like the following work? VPS1: Panel+mx1 VPS2: web+webmail+mx2 Or VPS1: Panel+web+webmail+mx1 VPS2: mx2 Thank you! Also, thanks a lot for ISPConfig!
you don't say where dns is being handled.. if that's done by ispconfig, or externally.. if you're only using a single server at the moment, i'm going to assume dns is handled outside of ispconfig. but essentially.. just install the second server the same as the first one.. join it to the first one as a multiserver setup, but don't install the ispconfig gui to the 2nd server. then just make the 2nd server a mirror of the first server.. currently you can use the dovecot sync config, which should be fully described in one of the tutorials, to sync the actual mailbox folders and files between the servers.. although it sounds like that option is going to get removed from newer releases of dovecot.. so you may want to start looking at different methods of syncing files/folders between servers, or use a shared storage solution.. nfs / drbd etc.. if you're going to use ispconfig for dns.. then mirroring will still work, as long as you don't use dnssec. if you do use dnssec, you may want to use 2 small vps's just for dns, configured properly as primary and secondary dns servers rather than mirror those.
One thing that you might want to ask yourself is if you really need mirroring here. Often, it is better to have a good backup and restore strategy, e.g. when you use a Cloud server, turn on automatic nightly backups for the cloud instance (if provided by your cloud hoster) and then use the snapshot feature of the cloud system (if available) to make a snapshot in case you do a larger system maintenance like a dist upgrade. In general, computer systems tend to fail more often the more complicated the setup is, so a simple single mail server might have a better uptime than your mirrored setup, especially if maintaining and setting up such systems is not your primary business. And when it comes to emails, other servers will try to re-deliver mails if your server is temporarily down, so even if you reboot the system or if it would be down for an hour, you will normally not lose any incoming emails.
I thought it would be nice if my cloud hosting provider offered a snapshot service, but unfortunately my cloud hosting provider doesn't offer this service. It looks like I'm going to keep a single server running for now, so maybe that would be better for this stage. Thank you very much for your suggestions.
Recently, my ISPConfig server was down for more than 2 days due to an internal network failure of the server provider... In this case, as “till” mentioned, a short downtime, such as 1 hour, usually the other server will try to re-deliver, but in fact there is a problem, my users can not send and receive emails in this 1 hour, which will cause another negative impact. So, I'm wondering if I should add a new server as a mirror, as “nhybgtvfr” mentioned? If so, the original server as mx1 and the new server as mx2? Is this how it works? Thank you!
MX is only for the outside world where to send mail to. It has no impact on your users. You will need a 2nd (mirror) server which is exactly the same and shares or syncs its data with the 1st server. On top of that you'll need some sort of high availability solution in front of or on both servers which will send incoming mail and your users to the active server only (and maybe loadbalance when both are online) if you want proper failover functionality.
I guess I would just switch to a more reliable network provider. Good providers have basically no network outages. At Hetzner, when I would sum up all outages I had with my servers in the past 15 years, it might be 30 - 60 minutes, with no network issues in the past 5 years.
Not only you Outage of 48 hours is at least 46~47 hours above what would be acceptable to me too (and only once every few years max). Luckily I'm my own NOC
i have to say, i'm only a recent convert to hetzner (about 6 weeks, first 4 just testing stuff), but i'm liking it so far. moved most of my vps's over from aws and digital ocean.. few more to go.. but it looks like its gonna cost a bit less than a third of what i was paying between AWS and DO in total.. and i get vps's with more cpu's and ram at the same time. hetzners interface is nice and simple, and it's easy to work out what all the costs are... even after years of using aws, i can look at the billing console and still struggle to work out how they're working out some of their fees. if i had 2 days outage of everything.. i'd have already spend a day looking for an alternative provider. and i'd be asking for hosting costs to be reimbursed and compensation for lost business.
It's something I've been researching for the last two months. Do you have any specific comments about the front end, for example? Thank you!
That's where it gets tricky, mainly for cost reasons. More reliable service providers, the cost is higher, so I consider the general service providers, 2 VPS, the cost is lower than the reliable service providers 1 VPS... But I also consider that if the general service provider, 2 VPS distributed in different data centers, the possibility of simultaneous downtime... Thank you!
The current service provider, which I've been using for more than three years, is the first to have such a long outage, and even I can't accept it. Your own NOC, Network Operations Center? Thank you.
AWS and Digital Ocean are just too expensive for me... Hetzner's network connectivity in my service area is not ideal...
