For many years I ran my own mail server, for a while I ran it on my home broadband using a miniserver then I moved it to dedicated hosting (incidentally on Bytemark who are fantastic). I expanded to support my fathers company, my brothers' domains and ended up with probably 10 different domains being run from my server? I had that for a few years running postgres, mailscanner, dovecot, mysql, etc.
Then fairly recently I gave up, I am not an ISP, I am just a nerd with a job and a family. The system was generally hands off and ran itself, but I had to be careful: I had thousands of hack attempts every day (I even had a fun script that added firewall filters dynamically based on security probes), I had users who complained about mail deliver, I had logs to monitor and tidy and the worst part was a failure while I was on holiday requiring me to SSH in via my phone.
In the end the final straw was when the dedicated host had a disk failure, Bytemark were fantastic in helping me migrate, oddly the RAID did corrupt some users and I spent ages fixing things and everyone accepted the disruption because they were getting something for nothing (I never charged my family, even if I should have).
But at the end of the day I don't care enough that GCHQ or the NSA want to read my emails, yes it is a violation of my privacy and I am not that bothered. I know that if they really do escalate into a dystopia that I have the skills and knowledge to hide anything I want, but as a reason to go through the grief of running a host? No thanks.
I've now moved most of my services to dreamhost, got my family to make their own provisions and I just have to worry about passwords (mine are really complex). A 10 year experiment with hosting resulted in me realising that it probably isn't worth the hassle, even if things are made easier, when they go wrong this is Linux land and you still have to dive in deep to fix the problems.
Glad I did it, might do it again one day, but my life is easier now that I don't.
Then fairly recently I gave up, I am not an ISP, I am just a nerd with a job and a family. The system was generally hands off and ran itself, but I had to be careful: I had thousands of hack attempts every day (I even had a fun script that added firewall filters dynamically based on security probes), I had users who complained about mail deliver, I had logs to monitor and tidy and the worst part was a failure while I was on holiday requiring me to SSH in via my phone.
In the end the final straw was when the dedicated host had a disk failure, Bytemark were fantastic in helping me migrate, oddly the RAID did corrupt some users and I spent ages fixing things and everyone accepted the disruption because they were getting something for nothing (I never charged my family, even if I should have).
But at the end of the day I don't care enough that GCHQ or the NSA want to read my emails, yes it is a violation of my privacy and I am not that bothered. I know that if they really do escalate into a dystopia that I have the skills and knowledge to hide anything I want, but as a reason to go through the grief of running a host? No thanks.
I've now moved most of my services to dreamhost, got my family to make their own provisions and I just have to worry about passwords (mine are really complex). A 10 year experiment with hosting resulted in me realising that it probably isn't worth the hassle, even if things are made easier, when they go wrong this is Linux land and you still have to dive in deep to fix the problems.
Glad I did it, might do it again one day, but my life is easier now that I don't.