I received a notice from my VPS provider of an upcoming maintenance window on the hardware hosting my mailinabox VPS instance. During the window, the hardware will be rebooted and the provider is recommending that all customer VPS’s be shut down before the window to prevent potential file system issues resulting from improper shutdown. In my case, it would mean shutting down my mailinabox for ~7 hours, which I’d rather not do since I don’t want to lose mail.
Has anyone had experience with VPS hosting maintenance windows? Can my instance be left running reasonably safely?
There should not be an issue with a short downtime as long as you have a 2nd DNS server (which is not on the box) that can resolve. The other servers will try to resend the emails multiple times for a longer period if your server is down but the DNS records exist.
Thanks. My DNS is hosted at Cloudflare, not on the box, so that’s fine. Is there a standard defined period of time during which a mail server will attempt re-delivery before giving up?