VPS / cPanel for Mail Hosting

[apsmith]

Hi,

I am exploring the option of getting another VPS (Enterprise) with cPanel to use with a Mail Hosting offer we are working on for our clients.

It will only be used to host domains using xmail skin. The home page for each domain will be a static placeholder. It will be setup with Mail Scanning to check all incoming mail for Viruses and Spam and clients can access their mail by either POP, IMAP or webmail (looking at limiting it to Squiralmail only). Most clients will use their own ISP's outgoing SMTP gateway.

About 20% of our clients would be using this service regularly (more than once an hour), where as a large portion will be once or twice a day.

Will the Business or Enterprise configured VPS be suitable to do this?

What would be a realistic number of domains that could be hosted on the VPS when being used in this maner? I know ther eis no golden answer and it the best answer is to base it on your server performance at the end of the day, and every user is unique.

Should I skip the VPS and go straight for a dedicated? Or start off with a VPS and look at upgrading to a dedicated later?

Appreciate any feedback or comments.

Thank you.

Andrew.

[Andre]

Hi Andrew,

In this case there it would mainly depend on how many users are involved, and how frequently they are checking their email. We recently had a customer who had a starter VPS and would have up to 250 people checking their mail at the same time (constantly), and as you understand that just wouldn't cut it - that would even cause a high load on a dedicated server.

So if you can tell me how many users are involved, and how frequently they are checking their mail, I'll be able to give a rough estimation for you. In nearly all cases a VPS will do just fine for this purpose. We have quite a few users who use their VPS for mail only and they are able to hold a good amount of users.

Most likely the best thing to do would be to get started with the business or enterprise plan, and simply check the load based on your usage. It's always possible to upgrade your VPS and if need be you could still upgrade to a dedicated server.