Vultr, at least in the U.S. DCs, doesn’t block anything. I’ve read reports that they block some ports in Europe, but open them with a support ticket request. However, those reports come from people running lots of other servers. I wonder about brand-new customers with domains not previously used for email requesting mail ports opened could be a red flag, and a brighter red flag is you are using a free month type of offer.
What hosting are you using?
I use Linode, and you need a support ticket (and rDNS set up) for Linode to open port 25.
Been trying out a few providers -
Digital Ocean / Google are hard blocks; doesn’t seem to have much room to move.
Linode / AWS / Azure need to raise support ticket. I mentioned MIAB and personal use server and block lifted (Linode same day, others took a couple of days)
Vultr doesn’t block from the start
How is Digital Ocean a hard block? I sent their support a mail and got it opened up really fast. Running MIAB on a DO droplet for almost 6 months now.
I stand corrected. In my records I had noted “Hard block 25” as a reason to stop testing with them but can’t seem to find the reference now. Given you went through support and they have capability to lift then I will reassess. Thanks for info.
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I’ve seen these guys and they do seem quite attractive esp. if larger storage is desired. I am a bit of unlimited traffic tho - it can be slow compared to advertised bandwidth (IONOS terrible in this regard). How are these guys?
I used Contabo and Ionos. Ionos if fine for the Price at their VPS S (smallest price 1$ oder 1€), nobody can make a better price with fees. But Ionos larger capacities are really stupid in terms of power per dollar. Contabo is there much better. I need to mention when you use their VPS S then you need to modify your setup script because it does not want to start even when 512 mb are enought.At least when you have no giant mail server and have no other services on it.
@JoshData could we change the setup script to make a yes or no decision when people like me can run miab with 512 + 4 gb swap without problems? This would prevent the need at least for me to make unsupported modifications at the preflight script.
How did you get IONOS to work? I saw their $1 offer and it was attractive for jobs not stressed on bandwidth and so good for MiaB. However, when I tried to install, it failed on fresh instance due to lack of RAM and I didn’t know there was special mods I could use to force it to proceed.
Not sure on what is special with IONOS but all the other providers I tested all seem fine with 512mb.
@kellytrinh Traffic is advertised as unlimited, but I read (older) reviews about bandwidth getting limited permanently for too high traffic. I think they were talking about root-servers that were downgraded from 1 GBit/s to 100 MBit/s. Didn’t find anything recent, but I have to admit that I didn’t care much - email doesn’t create much traffic.
About the bandwidth: Just used https://speedtest.wtnet.de/ for testing. Average download speed was 154 MBit/s (200 MBit/s port) when I downloaded the 1000mb.bin. Could be a “problem” with wtnet, though.
Yeh I am not so stressed too on the traffic front - as you said for mail it just doesn’t generate that much traffic.
I was testing speeds to here in SG and getting 100kB/s - no idea where the hiccup was but when I do similar setups in US/EU for other providers I still get ~100Mbits and given other installation difficulties I just gave up on IONOS. A shame coz their pricing was strong.
when you do the first command and try to install miab via setup.sh it downloads every script. Go to the root/miab/setup/preflight . Search for the number 512. This is casted with a check of ram that you can completly ingore with the usage of #.
Cool. Thanks. I’ll keep in mind. Not sure if IONOS is nick-and-diming me coz other providers advertising 512mb don’t have this issue. Anyway, at the price if can make it work then clear winner (altho their general pushiness to upsell still annoying)
Back on topic - Not sure if anyone tried Scaleway - at EUR3/mth pricing is competitive and their support is fast and there is a nice slack community for troubleshooting. Didn’t end up going very far with them since already have setup elsewhere but if starting from scratch I would consider…
I’m using Amazon ec2 with a t3a micro instance. used to be t2. I did have amazon unblock the port.
Test was made with Contabo, just to avoid any confusion 
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Vultr is the best for me. I’ve migrated to Lineode, then DigitalOcean, then went right back to Vultr. Great home.
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I use Lunanode - servers based on Montreal, Toronto or France - key for me is their Canadian servers - Montreal and France they are OVH resellers, Toronto, which is where I host, they use their own servers. I’ve been using them for several years with no downtime, and no issues - quick support, you get what you pay for, pretty reasonable fees. They don’t block port 25.
I run a few instances of MIAB - most are on a 1GB RAM virtual machine for US$3.50 per month (1 CPU core only as MIAB has little CPU requirements) I use volume backed SSD storage so I can increase beyond the 15GB included easily (and build out to meet my needs as they expand), and this includes 1000GB bandwidth monthly, which I don’t go over with about 25 fairly active email addresses.
They have an unadvertised $20 free credit (valid for 60 days) if you reside in US or Canada so you can try their service - once you signup, enter the promotion code TATPJAG at Billing -> Promotions.
Good luck with where-ever you choose!
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Since I switched to using MIAB, I’m on Linode. Yes not the cheapest, but never had any issues. I’m also using their NS2, NS3 as redundant servers.
Mail port 25 was never blocked, out or inbound; this may be changed lately! Linode support is very responsive! I had to request rDNS via support ticket to be set.
The only issue I had, in the beginning, was that all my emails were going to spam on providers like MS outlook and other big ones. The problem was my new IPv4 was blacklisted ( the whole subnet range was backlisted on spamhaus ) after sending request they took out my IP and had no issues ever since.
But I’m thinking to get a second MIAB instance as failover and may go to another provider just because, I’m running on $10 instance now p/m and I’m not using many resources, and then I’ll shrink my primary MIAB VM on Linode instance to the smallest one again duo personal budget shrinking, but I do not want to leave them for a reason is build up IPv4/6 reputation and also Linode reliability.
Regards,
If you’re based in Europe, https://www.hetzner.com/cloud is pretty good. German and Finish locations, so you can keep you’re data within the EU, good prices (€2.96/month), no ports blocked as far as I can tell. Limited contact I’ve had with support was good.