Installation in “the cloud” - will VPS function?

Is the cloud install a recommendation or requirement?

Will it run on an old school VPS?

I don’t understand. If your VPS runs like a machine (virtual or physical), and you can get root/sudo access, and can have Ubuntu server 18.04 LTS, then it will work. Well, as long as it meets specifications to run the applications, and it might not work if public Internet isn’t there.

I have mine running on a VPS, with Digital Ocean. They installed Ubuntu 18.04 for me, then I SSH’d into it, ran the startup script, and it works just fine.

Now, I don’t know where you got the recommendation for using “cloud install”, but this is what I imagine: it is generally preferred that your email server (i.e. server/client, smtp/smtpd/dovecot, if you know what those are) is reliable and secure.

If you host this at home, you might run into a few problems. What if your power goes out? What if you spill coffee on your server? What if you get dizzy and fall on your server, and soft/hard damage your hard drives? What happens if your home network goes down? What happens if someone breaks into your house and hacks into your server? What if your ISP gives you a residential IP address, and most mail servers reject your traffic? What if your ISP blocks incoming port 25/80/443 traffic, or other ports needed to run a server? What if it is a breach of contract to host a server on you ISP’s network?

All these things are usually solved with paying for a VPS. They have reliability teams, redundant networks, enterprise-grade public Internet, security guards, physical access control, and good physical hardware that allows the system to be turned on for literal years at a time.

Uhmm … yes it will run on an ‘old school VPS’ if your definition of that is the same as mine.

My definition of a VPS - a computer server run in ‘the cloud’ by an internet service provider. :slight_smile:

The phrase cloud is used extensively in the install guide as well as referencing dedicated cloud providers such as DO, Linode and Amazon.

To some degree it is a marketing term but there are differences between single box VPS and cloud services, not that I am claiming to be an expert.

So if a cloud VPS isn’t required that opens alot of options and decreases cost.

If you are thinking of installing it on a virtual machine on your desktop at home, you are going to have a lot of obstacles to overcome. Starting with residential ISP’s blocking email ports, not assigning a static IP and not having a means of setting rDNS. Most residential ISP’s won’t allow any of that.

Besides, excellent VPS’s can be had for $3 a month.

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