Why I host
So, this has been a self inflicted comedy of errors that first started a year ago when I decided I should stop hosting my stuff on Linode, an American firm that I had used for around a decade.
Table of Contents
OVHcloud
Firstly I tried OVH and to quote my post about it,
OVH's account creation, documentation, support and account deletion is possibly the worst I have ever encountered. Please use someone else. For why, read on. To find out how to delete your account, skip to the end.
What's wrong with OVH?
So I left for Netim.
Netim
And I tried Netim. I initially thought that they were fairly solid until I noticed my website visitors dropping rapidly. I actually spent a month or so trying to work it out on my own before, with eighty four pages of one website and forty of another marked 403 in Google Search Console, I filed a support request.
To which they replied,
Hello,
We have made a modification in the firewall for this, the next passage should be good and not leave 403.
And then...
Hello,
It is possible that the Google bots were blocked by our firewall system due to multiple accesses to non-existent files.
This happens if a lot of traffic from the same IP address is detected.
It is safe to say that this didn't fill me with confidence so I started to leave only to be stopped by them closing down their hosting services and moving it all to another provider, Hosting.
Hosting
The migration actually went pretty smoothly. There was a bit of a communication glitch and a a few problems with DNS but I kept an eye on things and it was largely without incident.
Hosting speed seemed fine, email was working. The interface was a bit clunky but they all seem to be in one way or another. (Each company hase it's own idea of the best way of laying things out and they all take time to learn).
I was with them for about a year and the only problem I had was billing without warning until I went to move a few domains to Cloudflare and was unable to disable DNSSEC in order to transfer them.
So, I made a support request only to be told,
Hello,
unfortunately, we do not offer this for these domain extensions. Domain management continues to be handled by Netim, where it is currently extremely difficult for us to activate/deactivate DNSSEC.
At which point red lights started flashing in my head as I was now at a provider who did not control their domains.
I spent a few days getting Netim to release my domains and left.
Cloudflare
I moved the New Zealand domains to Cloudflare pages which is great because it just sits there and works.
OVHcloud 2
I then transferred the European domains to OVHcloud and set up a VPS to handle email and web serving but unfortunately the VPS IP range was listed on Spamhaus and I seemed to be missing emails so I bit the bullet and got their cheap web hosting plan which promised multi-sites and 10 email address's among other things.
But it turned out that when they said 10 email addresses they only meant for one domain name. At this point I was tired and getting angry as shown in this email to support.
I bought the Personal Web Hosting as it said it was multi site with ten email accounts (https://web.archive.org/web/20260210133705/https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/web-hosting/personal-offer/). It is. But you can only use the ten email accounts on one domain and, even if I was to buy an additional MX plan to cover the other three domains I want addresses on, it appears it is either impossible or annoyingly complex to set up an email account.
All in all, it has been a waste of a day over a very bad worded advertisement.
And I got a refund.
So, I decided that what I needed to do was to separate the emails from the websites and have some solid email hosting.
Mailo
Mailo was offering,
- 20 GB for your e-mails*
- 5 GB for your documents and photos*
- 100 aliases
- Lifetime e-mail address
- Premium assistance
- IMAP4, POP3, EAS
- Access to all Mailo services: mail, calendar, address book, cloud, sharing...
And all for 1€/month with Mailo Premium. Perfect I thought and signed up. In general, anytime a service says you waive your rights to a refund under European law there should be warning lights.
The UI was confusing and clunky with features like using back-arrow on the browser to logout which drove me mad as I come from a world of tabs in which I consistently use back-arrow to go back a page. But, that is doable, I wasn't going to do more than set up my accounts and then use Thunderbird so I only had to do it once.
I started to set up what they called Spaces and point my DNS at their MX servers which is where I started to run into trouble. The 20 GB for your emails was apparently only for the main email address but each of the custom email addresses I was setting up was given 1 GB so that was alright.
Unfortunately, to set up each space I had to choose an option.
Hello @mailo.com,
Your pack has expired for 0 days. You must renew it to keep enjoying the benefits.
To renew your subscription, go to the Options (by clicking on the gear wheelon the top right in the webmail, or in the menu in the Mailo app) and display the Your account section.
Yours sincerely
The Mailo team
Again, not impressed.
I was even less impressed by the account deletion process which goes like this,
- I cannot delete my account because it has spaces.
- Try to delete spaces.
- I cannot delete my spaces because they have email accounts.
- Delete email accounts.
- Try to delete spaces.
- I cannot delete spaces because I have domains attached.
- Delete domains.
- Try to delete spaces.
- I cannot delete one space because although I get a message saying I am out of credit that space mysteriously has credit until June.
- Delete all other spaces.
- Try to delete entire account.
- Error message: Impossible task.
I have contacted support to request account deletion but since they never replied to my last email it appears they are overloaded so I don't hold out much hope.
Yunohost
And so I come back to Yunohost (why-you-no-host). I actual fact I have been here many times before and I cannot recommend more this application and its team. It is better, easier and quicker than dealing with the multiple companies I have dealt with above and, as long as you keep it simple, it is rock solid. As it should be being built on Debian.
Use it.
Why I host
It's easier
The above problems are a good example of why I, with a small amount of know how, host their own digital space. It's just better, cheaper and easier than spending two years cycling through providers that fail to provide either what they advertised or what I thought they advertised.
More options
I have mentioned Yunohost above but there are a number of other open source providers of similar software. For a more website hosting focused option there is HestiaCP, and for a home server there is Open Media Vault. And there are dozens of others.
Alternatives to Yunohost Alternatives to HestiaCP Alternatives to OMV
It's cheaper
A 5€/month VPS will get you 4GB of RAM and 80GB of storage and you can set up just about anything on it. It's just not worth doing the run around of the commercial providers. If you can use your home connection then an old laptop can provide nearly everything you need for only the price of power.
Digital sovereignty
Controlling your digital space is a good idea as is investing in your own countries digital infrastructure is a good idea.
There have been a range of calls for European Digital Sovereignty for a long time but no real movement. The slogan is more popular than ever now that the United States has been applying pressure on Europe's tender spots but little if anything has been done either by the European Parliament or by individual member states to push back against the monopoly.
For instance France has announced that it will roll out the Visio platform across all government departments by 2027 so it doesn't rely on Microsoft Teams anymore. The European Commission has begun trialing Matrix based messaging to also replace or compliment Microsoft Teams. All of this is good but it is also very little, very late.
The chief threat to European digital sovereignty in my view is hardware. Europe is, like much of the world, incredibly dependent on American and Taiwanese semiconductors but unfortunately building hardware infrastructure takes decades and Europe doesn't really have that much time. There is unfortunately, little they can do about that threat in the short term.
Software holds much greater promise though and a mix of software and privacy can fire an enormous warning shot across the bow of the American tech industry. It is estimated that the annual surplus in digital trade with the U.S. is around €100 billion. Not in Europe's favor. Much of this surplus will be due to licensing of software like Windows, or even worse Microsoft Office. One person has estimated that the EU spends over €200 million annually on Office 365 licensing. Requiring government documents to be in open formats, investing in the specification and giving grants to European open source programmers to solve problems in the software would benefit Europe, the world and have Microsoft screaming blue murder at the United States Government.
And the best way to get there is a start at home.
