Hosting Email server

[mohabutaleb]

Hello Everyone,

This is an advisory question.

I would like to use VestaCP to host our Email server

- Is vestacp capable to host 120 production mailboxes ?
- What are the minimum requirements for the server to work efficiently ?
- What can we do to make it highly available ?

Thanks,

[SS88]

Yes. It can handle 120 mailboxes easily with concurrent connections. I have over 120 on one server with 6GB RAM and when you optimize Dovecot the RAM usage is significantly lowered.

You can optimize Dovecot (IMAP/POP daemon): http://wiki.dovecot.org/PerformanceTuning

There's currently no way for "high availability" (I believe it's coming with mail clustering) but you can set-up a secondary MX server that accepts emails to domain names you specify and forwards them back. The only downside is if your mail e-mail server goes down, your customers cannot receive/send e-mail but the second email server will accept e-mail while the first one is offline. Here is the guide: viewtopic.php?t=11174

[dpeca]

- Is vestacp capable to host 120 production mailboxes ?
- What are the minimum requirements for the server to work efficiently ?

Also, these questions are not related to Vesta.

You can consider Vesta as just a 'configuration tool' that will configure Exim4 and dovecot daemons.
So, your questions are basically related to Exim4 and dovecot daemons.

How much mailboxes these daemons can handle?
As much as you have free space on your server hard-drive.
Probably much much much more than 120 mailboxes.
And of course - everything depends on volume of mail traffic in relation with RAM and CPU speed of your server.

Email proccesing is not difficult procces, so even VPS with only 4GB RAM can handle it (if you don't have abnormally high volume of mail traffic).

Maybe you can find some benchmarks on the internet about Exim4 + Spamassassin + ClamAV + dovecot.

[mohabutaleb]

Yes, so basically I was planning to use it on the below server specs. \

- 2 Vcpu
- 7GB RAM
- 100 GB SSD

so, does that need any Devcot optimization ?

[SS88]

Yes, so basically I was planning to use it on the below server specs. \

- 2 Vcpu
- 7GB RAM
- 100 GB SSD

so, does that need any Devcot optimization ?

You'll be fine. I did this as a preventative - but you shouldn't need it as you have SSD. If you see a slow down of I/O you can do this: http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation/LocalDisk

Since power failures and kernel panics are quite rare, many people are tempted to disable fsyncing because it may increase the performance quite a lot. Dovecot allows this by setting mail_fsync=never. However you should consider leaving it at "optimized" for LDA and LMTP. You can do this with:

Code: Select all

# Default to no fsyncing
mail_fsync = never

protocol lda {
  # Enable fsyncing for LDA
  mail_fsync = optimized
}
protocol lmtp {
  # Enable fsyncing for LMTP
  mail_fsync = optimized
}

[mehargags]

HA and Performance is one side of it, the major side of Email Hosting to ensure is
1) Mail Deliverability and Inboxing to recipient
2) Manage incoming SPAM efficiently

Unless you master both of these, you will repent the very day and decision of hosting your own Mail server.

If budget permits, a hosted mail solution is best for the small number of mailboxes you need.
Trust me...!