It’s really the end of an era. A bit useless calling it an era, but it’s over nonetheless. I’m moving from Binero.

Background

When I moved to Binero I did it because I wanted something more stable and preferably something faster than One.com. Binero was more expensive – especially for a student – but it seemed to be worth it.

Web performance

There might have been some outages here and there, but overall I’m really happy with the web hosting. It might have become slower over the years, but that might be a matter of perception and getting used to blazingly fast load times. And for a blog, does it really matter?

Email

An issue with serving a personal web page is negligible, but an issue with email is not. Shortly after starting at BTH I noticed that the email server was rejecting some messages from our email lists. A few bounces later and the list unsubscribed me. Yay.

And neither me nor the support team at Binero could really solve the issue. It seemed like they didn’t host the email themselves, but rather outsourced it. Perhaps the support department was mistaken. In either case, fortunately, the bounces stopped a week later, so someone had resolved the issue.

Sometimes email from me would bounce or get flagged as spam on the receiver’s end. The spam part got worse and worse over time.

The Breaking Point

Really, it was two things that pushed me to move.

Firstly, I started getting bounce messages from unknown email servers for messages that I’ve never sent. After looking at the content I understood that the outbound messages didn’t originate from Binero. Someone was sending spam and spoofing the From header, using one of my trash email addresses.

My domain and email didn’t have any of the SPF-DKIM-whatchamacallit.

The lack of email directives in the DNS settings in turn caused Google to start rejecting my emails to Gmail recipients. I could add SPF etc myself, but it really bugged me that the hosting provider didn’t set this up.

Secondly, a price hike. When I signed up a long long time ago the monthly subscription was 69SEK (nice). Now they’re asking 150SEK. I started thinking about migrating when it passed 120SEK… at that price point I could subscribe to a standalone email service and either go with a VPS or hosting of static files.

What am I getting for €180 per year? A not-very-fast place to host WordPress, and an email service I have to manage myself?

Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Email

… at least not their email. I swiftly moved to Proton instead.

Did I have a methodology to my email-provider-research? Of course not. I looked at a bunch of different options and thought about it for a while.

I did roughly know what I was looking for:

  • Not self-hosted. I don’t want to manage an email server in my spare time, and I really don’t want to make sure it works 24/7/365,25.
  • Not one of the large “free” providers such as Google and Microsoft. I don’t want to give them more data if I can help it.
  • Price-wise, something close to ~€5/month.
  • Some focus on privacy.

Proton fit the bill.

Hosting

Hosting is more straight-forward. My first thought was a cheap VPS. It’s not a big deal to set up a web server, and the host is pretty expendable since it’s all static files anyway.

But a friend of mine were hosting things in Cloudflare, and I thought I could give it a shot as well. Their pages feature allows hosting of static front-end apps. Which is essentially what I need.

Let’s see how it pans out.