Email and Web Hosting

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1

I hope this isn’t too far off topic for this list.

We acquired a small ISP a couple years ago that has its roots in the “local ISPs” of the 90s. This ISP is still hosting email and web services for customers both on company domains as well as customer domains. There is some decent revenue coming from these services, but cost of maintenance is becoming a challenge. We are looking at migrating to another platform or completely discontinuing those services.

I’m wondering if others here have gone through that process and have any advice as to how to go about it.

2

Two decent options, one on prem and the other fully hosted.

Tucows/OpenSRS has a fully hosted email offering that was built for ISPs to resell. (They also have domain registration and some other ISP focused services.)

https://opensrs.com/services/hosted-email/

MagicMail is an email (including webmail) suite that you run on prem. It is comparatively inexpensive but also fully supported. It’s built largely on qmail, but they replaced some of the components to deal with spam and virus filtering more efficiently.

https://www.magicmail.com/

I have direct experience with both and have used them both for ISPs specifically.

3

Question, what platform(s) are you running now? What must you provide for
email, SMTP, IMAP, webmail, groupware, etc? Do you have any intention of
growing this?

For the websites, what do they need? Are you running any old PHP 3/4 stuff?
You can setup a control panel, but if you're not running one now, and you're
not going to expand it, why not just cap it until it becomes unprofitable?

I'm a proponent of hosting my own email, it's not that hard and any ISP should
be able to do it.

4

The current platform is a custom collection of open source software, smtp, imap, pop, webmail. Web hosting is a basic LAMP stack all php 5.2 or greater. There is no interest in growing these services.

5

Why not migrate them to a cpanel instance?

Thanks

Travis

6

Or Virtualmin, in a docker instance per Customer… (If you are in the virtualization business)

I think Bryan just don’t want to deal with emails since (“support costs” + “headaches”) > “income” at his volume.

So better find a bulk service IMHO…

7

Ok, so this really doesn't say much in terms of software in use. Almost all
SMTP/IMAP/POP servers are open source, and could be anything from sendmail 8
to postfix. If you're capping it, just run what's in place and learn it, I'd
think most people in networking have configured apache once or twice before.

8

The issue is not an understanding of how to run the system. The issue is that it isn’t our core business and we want to minimize/eliminate the money and time needed to maintain the infrastructure and support the services.

9

Sounds like you already know what the decision is. If you can justify it, no need to second guess.

If my ISP stopped providing email services I wouldn’t even know. [ may even check if i get bored ]

Hope that helps.

YMMV,

-M<

10

It appears that Steve Saner <ssaner@ideatek.com> said:

-=-=-=-=-=-

The issue is not an understanding of how to run the system. The issue is
that it isn't our core business and we want to minimize/eliminate the money
and time needed to maintain the infrastructure and support the services.

I agree that Tucows' white label service is a good choice. I've been using it for some
of my customers for years.

11

This is good to know. I have also considered it for a number of things. Glad to know that it works.

12

Tucows/OpenSRS works well for “ISP email”

13

If the client base wants to stick with basic IMAP/POP3 email Tucows/OpenSRS has a good platform. Also a few years ago my company migrated business email accounts and domains from an ISP and moved them to Office 365 and did a revenue share with the ISP. They where happy still got a bit of revenue but did not have to support it.

Ryan

14

If the client base wants to stick with basic IMAP/POP3 email Tucows/OpenSRS has a good platform. Also a few years ago my company migrated business email accounts and domains from an ISP and moved them to Office 365 and did a revenue share with the ISP. They where happy still got a bit of revenue but did not have to support it.

Ryan