It’s been a while since I’ve written a tutorial. Life came in the way and all my project ideas went on the back burner. But now, at my new job, I was forced to re-evaluate the way newsletters and bulk mails were sent and that’s when I came across Sendy. And it’s brilliant — a clean solution and interface for sending bulk mail. I haven’t been hired by Sendy to work on this tutorial; I genuinely like this product and hope that the following tutorial helps someone out there.
There is one very detailed Sendy on AWS tutorial that I would like to highlight here, without which I would not have been able to even start my project — https://colcol.co.uk/introduction-to-installing-sendy-and-virtualmin-on-aws/ My tutorial varies slightly as I have a bit of a tech background already so I was able to shorten the steps a bit. Also, I set up on Ubuntu 18.04 using a LAMP setup.
You don’t need a highly technical background to go through this tutorial, at the most you just might be slower at the setup. I’ve also added some troubleshooting and problems I encountered with the new version of Virtualmin and some ways to save money on the EC2 instance.
Some points to note:
- You must use the Ubuntu Server version so that its GUI-less. Saves on installation space.
- I tried and tested on the free tier (t2.micro type EC2) but it crashed a lot. Other tutorials online say it’s possible but I don’t know if Virtualmin upgraded or Sendy or the OS but eventually I had to shift to a t2.small and it’s working a lot better. I’ve left a note on how to start/stop instances automatically so you can save on some money there.
- You need to own your own domain to set this up.
- I have used Amazon SES to set this up instead of my own SMTP server.
- The reason I also chose EC2 over maybe a raspberry pi is because AWS gives you 62,000 emails free per month if your bulk mail server is hosted on EC2. Also, with the pi, you will be responsible for maintaining the internet etc.
#aws #sendy #amazon
