Korthrun

There are cases where forward and reverse DNS need to match, and you may not want to have any association between two domains. SMTP is something that comes to mind. If your HELO/EHLO domain doesn’t match up, there are many servers that just won’t deliver your mail. I host my own email, and I work with very technical people. I don’t want “fun-domain.com” and “domain-on-my-resume.com” resolving to the same IP address. But I can host them on the same server.

There’s still some software out there that does not support SNI.

While your post body focuses on VPS, your question doesn’t, so I’ll also mention self hosting your own VMs. You can do a lot with reverse proxies and funky port based traffic routers, but sometimes just giving the VM it’s own IP is way simpler. Especially if you don’t mind hosting the VM, but aren’t interested in managing the service. I host a VM for a MUD I used to play. I don’t run the MUD, I don’t want to. I want them to be able to do stuff on their website without me having to edit a reverse proxy config, or without having to give them access to the host server.

It can also be used to increase the number of connections you can have to a single interface.

Perhaps you’re hosting your own VPN and you want traffic to come out an entirely different interface than the one your other services are on, for segregation reasons.

A secondary IP can also allow for a bit of service redundancy. Probably not the most relevant thing in self-hosting land, but the ability to move an IP between two different VPSs (assuming they’re on different hypervisors anyway) is pretty handy.

I used to use prgmr, I still do but they call themselves TornadoVPS now. Haven’t had any issues.

For a while now I’ve been using either haproxy or nginx depending on my needs. I’ve hit instances with both where the functionality I want is in the paid version.

Have you looked for providers that offer ETRN? Seems like that might fit your use case well.

I’ve hosted my own email for over a decade with very few issues. It’s low ram and CPU usage so a very cheap VM (or a pair in different locations if you wanna be leet) can be a viable way to avoid the ISP related issues people have trying to host it at home. If you really want it all ending up at home you can do ETRN as mentioned and while TCP/25 is often blocked at home, the submission port (TCP/587) rarely is.

Configuration management and build automation are definitely worth the time and effort of learning. It doesn’t have to be ansible, find which tool suits your needs.

I also have a small domain that is relatively low traffic. A lot of the “all in one” software on the list you linked looks pretty cool, I can’t deny.

What I found is that I make very few changes. I used to add mailbox aliases fairly often, but the fact is there are only two users and enabling the “+” syntax in addresses put a stop to me needing to make new aliases when I wanted a new address.

I just don’t feel like I need a management interface. Because of this I’ve just sort of frankensteined my own setup together and I love it. It operates how I expect it to, and enforces the standards I care about to the extent that I desire (e.g. which SPF result codes am I ok accepting?).

• Postfix as SMTP/Submission server. I chose to go w/PAM based for outbound SMTP auth.
• Courier for IMAPS
• Dovecot for LDA (sieve is delightful)
• Snappymail for webmail (served by apache httpd)