I have a little Tonido plug on my fridge. For last 4-5 years it proudly served a couple of static websites, hosted the DNS zones for a few domains, and the SMTP redirection for those few domains. It didn’t hold the messages, just forwarded them to some other email service, like GMail.
Once a few months I found that my Tonido rebooted. I did bug me but not enough to get the time to find the reason and fix it. Maybe it was just a power outage, or maybe it was just getting old, or something else… Either way I didn’t want to put too much effort into this issue and would have preferred to move those services to freemium cloud services.
A few months ago I moved the DNZ zones to CloudFlare. I can’t express how thrilled I was seeing how easy they make the imigration. It took about 10 minutes to do the initial import. Simply awesome!
Next I was thinking about SMTP. The protocol it pretty reliable by itself, even the server is not reachable, it will keep trying for a couple more days. So I thought my Tonido is good enough for now. A couple of months ago though, I’ve put a little side project on it which is sending a little bulk email every night, so I was kind of worried about it not rebooting accidentally during that time.
A few weeks ago, through Heroku, I have stumbled upon Mailgun, and again I was thrilled by how well the migration went. It gave me all the functionality I need and the reliability I can’t ask from my little Tonido.
Heroku, CloudFlare, and Mailgun are all free for the small amount of data I have, so I just wanted to say a big “Thank you!” for that. :)