Expanding My Forum's Infrastructure: Seeking Advice on HestiaCP Setup and Contabo Experience

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Hi everyone,

I’m planning to expand my forum’s infrastructure and would love to get some insights and advice from the community. Here’s what I’m looking to achieve:

  1. Services on a Separate VPS:

    • Setting up HestiaCP to host an image server for forum uploads, making us independent of third-party services like Imgur.
    • Adding a file server with larger upload capacity.
    • Running a Nextcloud instance to provide our team and collaborators with a secure place for sharing and collaboration.

  2. Budget-Friendly VPS Option:

    • After some research, I’m considering Contabo’s VPS plan with 6 vCPU Cores, 16 GB RAM, and 200 GB NVMe storage. However, their port speed rules seem a bit tricky to understand. Does anyone have experience with them? Are their speeds sufficient for hosting these services?

  3. Email Server Dilemma:

    • Our forum’s current IP is unfortunately blacklisted, which is hurting our reputation and rankings. The domain itself is clean, and email activity is limited to internal communication. Would it be practical to host the mail server on the new VPS while keeping the forum on its current server? Any tips on managing this setup with Hestia?

If anyone has experience with Contabo, HestiaCP, or similar setups, your advice would be immensely helpful. Also, if you have suggestions for alternative VPS providers with similar specs and better port speed policies, I’m all ears!

Thanks in advance!

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I recommend offloading your outbound email relay to a transactional email service provider. Definitely don’t use a webserver as an email relay for any email that you care about.

This may not be the best venue to find the answers you need, as you really are searching for general practice advice and not anything that is specifically related to HestiaCP.

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I would recommend to avoid Contabo if possible. Better to go with Hetzner, if you want budget VPS.

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+1 for Hetzner <3

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I would personally go with with a cloud storage solutions like AWS / Cloudflare R2 or Backblaze or even Hetzner Storage for reasons:

  • Block storage is cheaper for unless you need a lot of it…
  • Less things to maintain…
  • If routed via Cloudflare B2 / R2 will be free for traffic… Did 90TB free with Cloudflare R2 Storage

For example:

5 euro / tb

vs € 45.06 / tb via VPS extra data

  1. Contabo’s you can be lucky if you have nodes that are not overselled. But also heard a lot of complains where performance are crap. With Hestia / Private we / I use Hetzner Cloud never had issues with it…

  2. Go with a 3rd party solution like Amazon SES / SMTP2GO

With Contabo you are for sure black listed…

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This post belongs more in forums like LowEndTalk or LowEndSpirit. You will find better answers there.

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The forum and the storage can be in the same server. You can then have a separate user with a subdomain for the nextcloud and so on.

Server+Storage: Hetzner auction has full phisical servers for under 40€/month
Storage only: Or try an S3 compatible storage such as Wasabi.

Email: For the smtp server… I usually have a different server for that purpose since a hacked website could get the IP banned.

A cheap VPS for email could do the trick or the Amazon SES.

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