Discourse on DigitalOcean with SMTP server on HostGator

Installation
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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:

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

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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:

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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.

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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.

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