Hello everyone, Being completely honest. I haven't posted for a while because i changed my ispconfig servers for a reseller with cpanel and all that stuff. I didn't like the desition but i did it because i had my VM's on Azure and all the email bounced as spam for some problem with the dinamic IPs. I used Sendgrid as smtp relay for a while and it workd perfect but the solution became too complex and a reseller seemed fine. I still search for reasons to go back to my Ispconfig / VPS solution because i liked it a lot, the software, the community and now i started to work with Digitalocean and their prices and products made me want to go back even more to Ispconfig. The thing is. For you who know more , is it a valid solution to have my "hosting company" on my own VPS and with ispconfig? I see that on hostgator or other companies storage is expensive so i was thinking that i could buy a VPN with backups and an extra storage. Maby merge it with the VPS's disk (if something like that can be done). I don't have many clients. If i get to have a stable server with 500GB storage i'll be happy. I'm sorry for my english and i hope someone can give me an advice. I really like the level of control that i have with Ispconfig and my own machines but i have to be sure that i will have a rebust solution. Thanks.
Sure, that's absoöutely fine in my opinion. This is what many small ISP or web design agencies that offer hosting to their clients do. Just ensure to use a datacenter/hosting provider that does not block ports, e.g. Digitalocean, Linode or Hetzner.
yes. you may even want to look at aws. for email, you'll have to request they configure a PTR record for your own email server and not rate-limit the email ports for you (it's actually a very simple process). can use EBS (local storage) or EFS (shared storage) for storage, or run another vm with EBS storage and nfs and mount that on other vm's for shared storage. install the aws-cli or s3fs and use s3 storage for backups. we use a mixture of aws instances and digital ocean droplets, in a multiserver ispconfig setup. switched to it after one too many expensive hardware failures when running our own physical servers.
hi guys, i'm trying to reach a small infrastructre to provide initial hosting features for my clients but it seems to be failing with basic requirements like sending emails. @nhybgtvfr do you have problems sending emails with your digital ocean's droplets?
I don't send emails out directly from DO. most of my infrastructure is on AWS. I have a mailserver (AWS) there for clients. and another one acting as a smarthost for the webservers. every webserver is blocked from sending out mail directly. stops any hackers using their own sender if they manage to get in. using another another instance for the smarthost for webservers means the main mailserver never gets blacklisted if some site does start spamming. all I have on DO is a small droplet to act as a mirror for the aws instance I use for DNS, and for any client VPS where their budget is too small to stretch to an AWS instance, and these still use the aws instance as a smarthost. I had to request aws remove rate limits from port 25, and configure PTR records for them. I don't know if DO rate limit or block those ports. also if your trying to send out to other mailservers, they should be doing basic checks, like reverse dns, so you will need the PTR records configured. and if your using a floating ip on DO, the droplet still keeps it's original public ip. and thats likely to be the source ip that other servers see, which could be conflicting with the PTR record if it is already configured.
Oh nice. I guess I miss the DNS configuration on my isp. It's kind of, idk how to configure it properly. Anyway, the multiserver setup with dedicated mail server is the way to go, I will try to update my infrastructure to reach this. What do you mean when you say "smartserver"? Is this the main isp server on a multiserver setup?
a smarthost is just another mailserver. all the webservers have postfix installed (i'd rather the sites use that rather than sendmail, php etc trying to send out. get better logging). the postfix configuration on each webserver is configured to send all outbound mail to this smarthost (another postfix install). the smarthost then handles all the mx lookups and mail delivery to the destination servers. I guess a smarthost instance could be part of ispconfig, not totally sure about that though, maybe Till could answer that part, and maybe give some details on how that would be configured through the control panel. I've just created it as a completely standalone, manually configured postfix server.
Nice, seems to be a very solid solution. So, just let me check if I understood it correctly. Your webserver(s) uses ISPConfig, than you have configured their postfix setup to send mails to your mailserver(a smarthost), these one is NOT running ISPConfig, and you have it configured with custom mail settings. That's it?
basically. yep. the webservers postfix are configured (etc/postfix/main.cf) with relayhost = <smarthost fqdn> the smarthost is configured (etc/postfix/main.cf) with mynetworks = <ip of webserver1>/32 <ip of webserver2>/32 … <ip of webserver##>/32 it was just a quick and dirty setup to get it all working. I need to revisit the configuration to do virus/spam checking before sending, rate limiting etc. (when (if) I ever get the time.)
