Hi Paul,
I don't think the type of VPN that HideMyAss.com and those places offer
will help you. They are more oriented towards browsing and, unless they
have some additional offering that I did't notice, would not allow traffic
initiated by others to reach you unless it is known to be in response to
traffic you generated.
I've looked web hosting several times recently and the two I've come
back to are csoft.net for shared hosting (starts at $5/month) and
gandi.net for virtual machine hosting (starts at $14/month). Although a
little more expensive than other choices, I like gandi.net for domain name
registration (which I haven't done much of so YMMV) and they have some
free services with registration if your needs are basic enough.
I like that csoft.net just alters the priority of your bandwidth based
on your account level and does not charge for bandwidth usage over a
specific amount (there is a bandwidth minimum per account type). I'm not
entirely sure how this works out in practice (I had an account with them
for a little while several years ago but didn't use it much), but I
suspect that other providers do the same thing in addition to charging you
extra if you go over bandwidth. You can relay through their mail server
after authenticating over TLS and they support POP3 and IMAP. There are a
few limitations of csoft hosting that do not apply to the Gandi cloud
hosting, such as that you will not use it to backup your computer.
csoft.net advertises having NetBSD hosts available, but didn't actually
when I last used them (they did have both OpenBSD and FreeBSD hosts then).
They use a custom (open source) administration system and will implement
feature change requests quickly if they meet their overall design
philosophy. Their SSL setup has a few issues according to ssllabs.com
analysis, but I hope they would quickly fix those too (you don't get SSL
for your website until the $25/month level and at the $35/month level
could presumably set it up how you want).
gandi.net only supports Linux variants. I'm not sure if it is possible
to run unsupported OSes at all. They are xen based, but it sounds like
they might have substantial local modifications.
These are at least the best I've been able to find with high
functionality and low cost as the primary criteria.
-Matt
On 2013-08-22 p...@whooppee.com wrote:
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 13:29:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: Paul Goyette <p...@whooppee.com>
To: netbsd-users@netbsd.org
Subject: OT: Reliable Email/Web hosting service - recommendations?
Some time next year, I'll be moving from the US to the Philippines. It is
next-to-impossible to get static-IPv4 addresses, and IPv6-access for
residential service is (apparently) even less likely.
So, I've got a couple of options. One would be to "lease" a fixed address
from a US-based company and set up a VPN-over-tunnel (HideMyAss.com for
example).
It seems easier to just have someone host my domain's mail and web services,
and probably less expensive,too. But I really don't want to have to use
web-based application for Email; I would much prefer using POP3 (via
pkgsrc/fetchmail or similar) to pull mail, and send directly (via postfix).
I would also prefer NOT to retain my current DNS services, and not have to
transfer them the Email/Web hosting service.
So, with all these requirements, does anyone have any suggestions or
recommendations?
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