I had been running an ISPConfig server for years. It was still running Ubuntu 18.04.x, and now I’ve moved onto an up to date VM running Nginx Proxy Manager and Mailcow
The old ISPConfig server had been chugging along peacefully all this time and while I knew I had to upgrade it at some point I didn’t know if I had the appetite to once again stick with ISPConfig, mainly due to it being old tech.
The main reason I was reticent to change was not the webhosting, it was not the DNS (offloaded some years ago to cloudflare), it was the email hosting.
Email hosting was always an annoyance, ISPConfig for all it’s historical greatness wasn’t the best at email. It functioned perfectly well but there had to be something infront of it to catch spam emails. I ‘paid’ for SpamHero, which did a great job.
You may notice I said ‘paid’ for spamhero. It costs around $5/month per domain, which is a bargain but having a lot of domains meant the cost for me would have been (too) high. I instead registered a single domain with them and added every other domain as an alias domain. They do no transformation on the domain so it didn’t affect my server and all my domains received adequate spam protection. I just had to ensure that user addresses (the part before the @) were registered with spamhero.
I’ve gone off topic… I created a mailcow instance and tested it with a dummy domain – WOW this thing is great. The built in spam protection is pretty good, good enough for me to sack off spamhero.
As for webhosting, nginx proxy manager pointing at a copy of nginx/php is working as expected, alongside a mariadb instance. Everything is right with the world