Ask HN: Would you pay for a personal email server?

2 points by 4k 11 years ago | 5 comments

I am trying to validate if hosting people's personal email servers would be a viable business.

In short, you just buy a domain and point it to the service's name server. Everything else is taken care of including updates etc. What you get is your private email server, not a mailbox on a server, but a server that's 100% yours. Would you pay for something like this?

paulrpotts 11 years ago |

I pay DreamHost for web hosting and e-mail hosting and managing domains for me. This is just for family and personal web sites. I don't have a dedicated server. There are a few downsides. DH provides SpamAssassin, with configuration via their web control panel. I've never been able to get it to work very well, and the junk mail it collects is only accessible via WebMail, not, say, Apple's Mail.app via IMAP. So that's not well-integrated with how I often use mail and it means I am driven to use Webmail more than I'd like to. I would pay modestly more for decent spam blocking!

4k 11 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback, that was helpful. :)

techwatching 11 years ago |

Good time to do this! Too bad there isn't a .ry TLD

https://hilla.ry/

ras15 11 years ago |

buying server form 3rd party dose not equal it's yours...

i would rather get my own one, push the IT team to do so etc...

hard to compete with cloud services anyways...

4k 11 years ago | |

To further clarify, the service aimed at users who like their privacy but do not have enough time or skill to maintain their own server, neither have IT team at their disposal.