My new European AWS SES alternative

I am currently in the process of migrating to a new mailserver setup that is integrated into my normal hosting setup on a new VPS at netcup. This time, the setup is based on the Docker images and configuration from a project called docker-mailserver (I previously used the other more popular docker-mailserver). It’s less monolithic and more flexible to adjust configuration etc. It also has a web UI to configure users, domains and aliases.

On my old setup, I used the European AWS’s SES as relay to send mails to Outlook, iCloud, T-Online, and some other hosts that have unreasonable strict policies. I used AWS as it was the only provider I found that allowed an unlimited number of domains and is pay-as-you-go without tiers starting from 15 $ per month.

But I was never that happy to use AWS in my European cloud setup, so I took another try and searched again. I found Cyso Cloud Transactional Mail Service which is based on the European Simple Mail Service. I signed up, configured all my domains and am so far using it for all outbound mails, as I don’t want to go through all the hastle to whitelist the new IP. To be honest, so far I only sent test mails, but all of them arrived quickly and without any problems.

Setup was also easy. And pricing is straightforward: 1000 emails free, 5 € for 1000 - 10.000 emails, and 0,5 € for every 1000 emails after that.

So if you are searching for a European AWS SES alternative, Cyso Cloud might be worth it.

Why am I migrating servers at all?

Previously I had two of the smallest VPSs at Hetzner, one for my blog and all the other public facing selfhosted services, and one for my mailserver. A few months ago, Hetzner already increased the prices for existing customers. Now, they did another really drastic price increase. I know it’s RAMocalypse and the new prices only apply when rescaling or creating new servers, but somehow this is giving me bad vibes. It also made me reconsider if I really need a totally seperate server for just the couple of mails I receive per day. With a bigger VPS running all my self-hosted services (next to the ones I already run at home) gives those non-mail related services more capacity (including storage), while costing less.