Inexpensive ‘Cloud’ hosting option?

Tags: Linux

I currently have a server co-located in a datacenter, that, realistically, is overkill for what I’m using it for at this point. Most of what is on it now could really be moved to my home environment or decommissioned entirely. But the one thing I’d like to keep ‘out there’ is my mail relay. The ‘mail relay’ in question is a linux machine, running webmin and a postfix setup handling the mail traffic. The gist of it is my MX records are pointing at this machine, so it receives all mail for all of my domains, and then relays it to my actual mail server. It also accepts the outbound mail from my server on a non-standard port and locked down to only accept it from my IP for distribution to the intended destinations. The main idea being I have a static source address for all my mail and in the event that I have an extended outage for whatever reason, all inbound mail will queue up indefinitely on this server until the destination becomes available again. Obviously, to handle this, it doesn’t need to be a super beefy machine.

Now, I know one option would be to get a VPS somewhere that just gives me a linux machine that I can do as I wish with, and replicate pretty much what I have now (If that’s really an option – I think it is) – but what other cost effective options might I have? Are there other AWS, DreamHost, HostGator, etc options that utilize something different, like Plesk or one of the other similar ‘front ends’ that I could use to accomplish the same thing? Does anyone have any thoughts on how I might accomplish this some way other than a raw linux machine that I install Webmin and postfix on to handle the task? Just looking to see what my other options might be to keep this functionality for a minimal cost.

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