On moving to a different hosting setup for my Web and email.

My mail server was getting guite full. So I considered upgrading my VM, but then it's really time to upgrade the OS and do related installation automation, and to consider moving hosting provider, and to consider different modern anti-spam solutions, and consider futher containerised deployments... I came to the conclusion that all this effort seems somewhat overkill for a personal email address and a couple of static websites.

So instead, I moved to Mythic Beast's shared Web and email hosting with ssh access. A hosting model from the nineties, but it does what I need it to do and is low cost, so why not. I chose Mythic because I already hosted my DNS there, support is knowledgeable and helpful, they are down-to-earth and Linux-hackery. I enjoy their blog, applaud their IPv6 efforts, and like their Raspberry Pi support. But most of all, I like their attitude; no gimmicks, no customer-hostile practices.

I did of course consider just giving up entirely and using Gmail, which has better spam detection, but I guess I'm too much of a believer in a distributed Internet.

The website moves were very straightfoward through the web UI: Redirecting from a bare domain to www and enabling TLS support (through Let's Encrypt) takes few button presses, then just put the content in place. Previously I setup manual dehydrated, and that took a bunch of time to get right, this was effortless.

Email migration was a matter of creating accounts for IMAP/SMTP, setting up some aliases, tweaking DNS. If you're happy with the default setup then you're done, but I wanted to replicate my maildrop server-side folder delivery and spam handling, and special-case some extension addresses. I wasn't very familiar with Exim filter format, and don't like it as much, but it will do. It's unfortunate that I can not drop spam at SMTP-time, but oh well; I don't think the spam bots take too much notice anyway.

Ssh access is what you expect. I can get to my mail, filter files and logs, and website files; use rsync and scp. Beyond that I use it for connectivity tests to other systems. And git is there, and python, for occasional hacks.

The downsides of a shared host apply: possible resource contention, perhaps a higher risk of unauthorized access, no root access, limited software (no docker); but that's balanced by not having any of the maintenance responsibilties.

We'll see how this goes over time. So far so good.