The march of new technology is relentless, but even so there are some staples that persist. Web servers, email servers and file servers have been with us almost since the birth of the internet. More recently, virtual machines have become the basic platform for the majority of application servers.

These technologies are so mature now that they are within reach of most small and medium sized organisations. And whilst the advice very often is don’t host your email, website or application servers yourself, there are significant savings to be had if you know what you are doing.

A plethora of Youtube vloggers and of course AI all offer advice and technical walk-throughs that can get you up and running even with modest equipment. For example a modern VPS at the base level only offers the same capabilities of a laptop manufactured in 2016!

The difficulty, of course, is no so much the setup but the ongoing maintenance of your own platform servers. This is where I come in.

Here’s a summary of the benefits of the workflow service I offer:-

Analysis of your current server platforms, end-to-end
Support in setting up email, web and application servers
Creating a secure infrastructure on which to host
Private servers inaccessible to the public
Public servers using reverse proxies
Server back up and redunancy

Sounds good, but how does it work in practice?

Here’s a good example: a mail server on a 10-year-old laptop
A client wanted full control of their email — their own domain, their own data, no third-party mailbox provider — but assumed it would mean expensive new hardware and an ongoing support contract. In practice, I built the whole thing on a ten-year-old laptop running Ubuntu Linux, using Mailu as the mail platform. Mailu bundles everything a proper mail server needs — SMTP, IMAP, spam filtering, antivirus and a web admin panel — into a manageable, self-hosted package, which meant the ageing hardware only had to do the one job well, rather than juggle a dozen separate services.

The final configuration comprised multiple email accounts and domains, and has been running successfully without interruption since 2022.

Here is a summary of my work to complete the installation: –

Issued auto-renewing Let’s Encrypt certificates for HTTPS and SSL,
Configured DMARC, SPF and DKIM so the mail wouldn’t get flagged as suspicious by other providers.
For resilience and security, installed the server behind a reverse proxy
Deployed two Oracle Cloud VMs providing redundancy and backup
Infrastructure means there is no single point of failure, helping to avoid any lost email.
Two-factor (2FA) authorisation for client and admin logins
Roundcube gives the client a familiar webmail interface for day-to-day use
Admin is also managed through via Roundcube, including spam filters and email quotas
Setup supports unlimited domains with hundreds of email addresses each
Daily backups and redundant server

All running on hardware that might otherwise have been sent to landfill!