HISTORY
I am a new MIAB user this year. My journey started back in January after I was using MXRoute as my email hosting provider, but push notifications all of a sudden stopped on iOS devices because Apple didn’t let customers renew their certificates that are required to allow push notifications. I don’t understand the entire story, but there is a blog post by MXRoute on their website from December 2024 with more information.
THEN
During my research, I found MIAB will enable push notifications out of the box thanks to z-push! Yay! Next step was to find a VPS provider with Pot 25 allowed and a CLEAN IP address that was not on a blacklist. I was over zealous about having a clean IP as I didn’t want to have to use a relay service for outgoing mail (I don’t know why, but now I see that was silly thinking.)
I started with one of my smaller hosts that I have experience with. Things worked for the first 1-2 months, but after a MIAB update, it broke. MIAB wouldn’t start after a VPS reboot. I had to start it manually. I think I know why. My VPS provider didn’t offer an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS image to install. Therefore, I selected 20.04 and then did an in-place upgrade to 22.04. It worked, but since I think this is not recommended, MIAB eventually broke. At least that’s my theory, and I really didn’t feel like investigating the reason why. So on the hunt for a new VPS provider with Ubuntu 22.04 as a default image!
NOW
I am now with OVH in their Ashburn, VA datacenter. All I can say is WoW 
! I am SUPER happy with OVH’s VPS. With a pre-pay discount, I am getting 2 AMD Epyc cores, with 2GB of RAM, and 40GB NVMe storage all for only $4.44/month. This is the FASTEST VPS I have ever had. I know MIAB doesn’t need such a powerful VPS, but it’s nice! When I was uploading my emails from an archive into their appropriate folders, I saw how fast everything was uploading and it was faster than any other VPS providers I tried. OVH is faster than Microsoft and Apple’s email server as well (no surprise there, since they throttle their users since they have so many.) It took me all of 10 minutes to upload thousands and thousands of messages going through my MacOS’s Mail app. Oh, and VPS reboot times? 10-15 seconds tops before I can log back in via SSH! That’s insanely fast!
MX RELAY PROVIDER
While OVH is known to not have clean IPs, I believe their entire IP ranges end up blacklists. Not to worry! I decided to get an MX relay service to get around this and just be done with it. This way I don’t have to worry.
During my reserach, it does appear a user on this forum @alento does offer an MX relay service called AnyMXRelay for fairly cheap. I decided not to go with them. On sale, it costs about $12/year. However, I believe they are just using MXRoute to send the outbound messages (correct me if I’m wrong.)
Since I’m already an MXRoute customer and I know their IPs are clean and they offer EXCELLENT inbox delivery success rate, I decided to signup for MXRoute’s 5GB lifetime plan for $75. While I won’t be using MXRoute for my mailbox, you can configure your MXRoute plan to use them as an MX Relay service!
It was super easy to configure MIAB to use MXRoute as an MX Relay service following MXRoute’s instructions. It took only a few minutes to configure and add a custom TXT DNS record to include MXRoute in the SPF record.
While MXRoute is $75 up-front for a lifetime plan and AnyMXRelay is only $12/year, I plan on keeping MIAB as my email hosting for as long as this software is around and maintained. In a little over 6 years is when the “break even” will happen. Not only that, I can use MXRoute’s lifetime plan for other stuff as well (which I’m already doing.) I can also move on from MIAB if the project is ever ended and continue to use MXRoute as my MX Relay provider with MailCow or some other email hosting software. I think $75 for MXRoute’s lifetime plan is well worth it. It’s lifetime as long as the company is in exhistance, which i think it’s fair to say, MXRoute will be around a long time.
CONCLUSION
I’m extremely happy with my OVH VPS and using MXRoute as my outbound MX Relay service. I know I’m new to MIAB, but I think I have nailed the PERFECT MIAB setup for me 
!
So, let’s hear it! What’s your MIAB setup look like? Are you happy with it or are you looking to change things up?
Let me know if you have any questions with my setup! I’ll try to answer 