Any VPS provider suggestion?

I’m living in the Asia Pacific. Need a VPS that opens for port 25 and has a reverseDNS.

For what it is worth, I use a Digital Ocean droplet in London that works perfectly for MIAB. They have a data centre option in Singapore which might work for you?

I have read that Digital Ocean block port 25 but that is not the case for London at least for me. I have MIAB and Cloudron servers running there without problems.

One install I did resulted in an IP blocked with Spamhaus. In that case it was trivial to snapshot the droplet and restore it on a new droplet with a different IP address.

Digital Ocean sets up the reverse DNS automatically based on the host name, e.g. box.example.com

Their 1GB droplet works perfectly for my MIAB needs. US$5 per month plus US$1 per month for backups. (MIAB does nightly backups to AWS as well). I have only half a dozen domains and a similar number of users though.

I used an external DNS for about nine months. I’ve recently moved all of my domains to Gandi.net and now use MIAB as the authorative name server. It was easy to set up glue records and then DNSSEC not supported by my previous registrar.

Your mileage may vary as they say.

Might I offer you a suggestion ???

The way that MiaB is configured, it is a single point of failure. If for some reason your DNS goes down, then your emails for the domains will fail. I’d like to suggest to you that you utilize Gandi’s free Secondary NS service. It is as simple as adding a one line entry to your MiaB as well as changing your ns2.box.domain.tld entry to ns6.gandi.net with Gandi. Once this is done, DNS will continue to function during an outage and any emails will be queued for delivery later, when your MiaB is back in operation - rather than failing.

Here is also an article on the subject that I wrote, using puck,nether.net as the Secondary DNS.

2 Likes

Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll look at it later.

UpCloud - Singapore or Sydney.

They will open port 25 on request after you go through a few questions about your usage with their support chat.

1 Like

I also recommend Upcloud, after using most other providers I almost exclusively use Upcloud for all my hosting needs running a number of nameservers, webservers and mail servers on their systems. Support is Top Class and almost instant in all cases. Yes, as a new customer you will need to ask for port 25 to be released after answering some basic questions but once done port 25 is then open for all future VPS on your account.

I used Digital Ocean for about a year, then they got blacklisted by Microsoft. I moved to Linode and have been running perfectly ever since, Linode seems to care more about their IP’s in my opinion than DO. I’d strongly suggest them!

Thank you @alento for the prompt to set up a secondary DNS and thanks for the pointers to documentation.

I successfully set up secondary DNS using Gandi for the main domains I run on MIAB. All green ticks.

One thing I wasn’t quite sure of is whether the Gandi secondary DNS address should be in place of ns2.box or added as a third domain at the registrar. I did the latter and all seems to work.

Thanks again

When you use a Secondary DNS provider with MiaB, the ns2.box.domain.tld name server is replaced with ns6.gandi.net in this case. So, in place of is the correct answer.

Yes, it will work, but some tools will show an error. But it is so minor… and everything does work fine.

This tool for instance… DNS Delegation Lab - BuddyNS Secondary DNS

1 Like

How about VPS server located in Singapore and Malaysia?

I’m a bit late to the thread but I’ve run a 10-account MIAB on the smallest BinaryLane VPS for several years and it’s been faultless the entire time. If you’re after something in the AsiaPac region I highly recommend them, especially for the price.

very nice; smallest size seems more than adequate for small MiaB setup. Looking at website linked it is $3.75. Is that AUD (saw the site is on .au) ? Even better then if it is !

That’s right, it’s $3.75 AUD (not including GST though), which at first seemed improbable for an Au datacenter. But it’s been a great VPS for miab, highly recommended.

Are you based out in AU? I wonder how GST works for VPS if purchase/use from offshore…

They should not need to charge you GST if you are not in Aust. I’d ask them directly to confirm they’re happy to do this. Although you’re only talking a difference of A$4.50 per year :slight_smile:

I actually went through the process of filing a complain and in a matter of days my IP in DO got Whitelisted by Microsoft. The problem with Microsoft is that they blacklist big IP ranges just to avoid going through each IP. Since then, I have no problems. I think that building IP reputation also takes time, and I already have mine about 4 years to loose it.

I went back and tidied up removing ns2.box and substituting ns6.gandi.net as the secondary DNS. All works and no errors reported.

Thanks for the pointers. Very much appreciated.