Hey everyone, apologies in advance for the probably very novice question… I don’t really specialize in the web development realm but I need to set up a community for an organization. I currently run some web servers on HostGator (LAMP stack with cPanel) which of course have fully functional SMTP servers. My question is this: is it possible to run the application on a DigitalOcean droplet but use an SMTP server on my HostGator account? I really don’t want to use one of those third party services. I’d be thankful for any pointers :heartpulse:

How is Hostgator not a third party service? :thinking:

What I meant is I don’t want to use Mailgun, etc. as I can’t have that as an extra cost at the moment. Very few people have their own mail server running in their house :stuck_out_tongue: . I can save on that cost by using a server which I already have. I hope I cleared that up :slight_smile:

If you can’t find anything here on meta using the search then the only real answer is… maybe? Mailgun is recommended because it’s widely used and quite reliable. It may be a false economy sacrificing mail deliverability in the name of costs - if you’re willing to take that risk then you don’t have much to lose by trying.

[image] Varlov: What I meant is I don’t want to use Mailgun, etc. as I can’t have that as an extra cost at the moment. Mailgun is super cheap and even free if you send fewer than 1,000 emails in a month. I’ve used Mailjet for my personal Discourse because it’s free up to 6.000 emails a month. That’s far more than I need, but I wouldn’t mind paying if I breached that limit because it would mean I’d built up a goodsized community. :wink: That said, I don’t see any reason not to try using your HostGator SMTP credentials when you configure Discourse and see what happens.

You can try Brevo, 300 emails per day, 9000 emails per month for free. this is also a good solution

Discourse on DigitalOcean with SMTP server on HostGator

Product Support Self-hosting

RGJ (Richard - Communiteq) December 5, 2023, 6:34pm 2

How is Hostgator not a third party service?

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Discourse on DigitalOcean with SMTP server on HostGator

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