Leaving Gmail and Google Apps
by Alpha01
Ever since finding out about Google’s involvement in PRISM a few months back, I’ve been wanting to completely ditch their Gmail and Google Docs services for good. Having used those services for such a long time, and more importantly them being free (as in beer), deciding which new platform I would use as the replacement was my first challenge. Firstly, all email services will be managed by me solely. So my first task was to find a reliable, and perhaps more importantly, a really cheap unmanaged dedicated hosting provider. I opted to go with OVH. Having first heard of OVH on a Linux Journal advertisement, I became completely sold on their $29.99 a month dedicated hosting offering. Even better, OVH is not an American company and they themselves having to deal with lots of scrutiny for hosting WikiLeaks. The really cheap $29.99 dedicated hosting plan does have a catch, the hardware is not enterprise quality server hardware, but rather desktop hardware. The disk is not RAIDed, and the memory is non ECC. Personally, since I don’t believe my server will have much heavy load, I really don’t see this as a problem. Additionally, using my home Nagios monitoring server and with the help of NRPE, I’m going to monitoring just about everything on the dedicated machine.
My current hypothetical architecture
Install configure KVM on the system, and run three virtual machine instances. The host machine will have the following:
- Varnish, to proxy all HTTP traffic
- Nginx, to proxy all HTTPS traffic
- Proxy POP/IMAP mail traffic using iptables (if this does not work as I expect, I might look into using haproxy instead)
1). VM 1: http
- Apache PHP/Ruby, all of my web apps will be using on this VM. (including this site itself)
2). VM 2: database
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
3). VM 3: email
- Postfix for sending mail
- Dovecot for receiving mail
google