1 linode for mail and web vs 1 for mail and 1 for web

Let Microsoft's new live.com (outlook.com) service take over your email needs.

http://knackforge.com/blog/vannia/migra … ve-domains">http://knackforge.com/blog/vannia/migrating-google-apps-windows-live-domains

@cthorpe:

With the ram double and Google dropping free Google Apps accounts, I am looking at adding a mail server.

I had been on a 1024 for my sites and never had any problems.

Now I have 2048, so my question is should I keep the 2048 and add a mail server, or should I downgrade the 2048 to a 1024 and spin up a second linode for mail? Is there any advantage in separating out the two other than if something goes wrong everything goes down?

I will of course need anti-spam and IMAP. Looking at maybe 30 email accounts in total with moderate to low volume.

Thanks!

Carl Thorpe

I run a full mail stack, a full web stack, and DNS on a 1024. Before the upgrade I ran it all on a 512. It all works at good speed.

If this is for a business I'd get two 1024's. One for mail, and one for web. That way if your website gets hacked then they don't get your mail, plus you can reboot or rebuild either one without affecting the other.

Don't even think about live.com. OK you can think about it as long as those thoughts don't diverge from pleasant daydreams about how much cleaner the world would be if it was destroyed by fire.

I agree with sednet; a mailserver itself isn't going to cause a serious load unless you handle truly epic volumes of mail.

Probably the biggest resource hog when it comes to mail is content-based filtering (e.g., Spamassassin). With the recent CPU and memory upgrades, this is less of a concern. But you're best off if you can reject spam before it gets to Spamassassin; I talk about my setup in a couple of recent posts. A large proportion of spam can be dumped just with basic sanity checks, greylisting, and, if you like, a DNSBL - all of these require few resources.

Set things up properly, and even with Spamassassin you should be fine, especially on a 2048.

@Vance:

I agree with sednet; a mailserver itself isn't going to cause a serious load unless you handle truly epic volumes of mail.

A large proportion of spam can be dumped just with basic sanity checks, greylisting, and, if you like, a DNSBL - all of these require few resources.

I find policyd-weight is good for this!

And yet again Linode's forums fail to notify me that there have been responses on my thread. :(

While I like the idea of separating my sites and my mail, I'm not sure if the added work of maintaining two separate machines is worth the hassle. Everything I am doing is business related, but 90% of it is my business, so if both go down at the same time for an update or whatever I can plan that when I'm asleep.

I'll look into your threads, Vance.

Thanks all for your input!

C