Member OP
Running a CS 1.6 server on a Contabo VPS for old friends. Box costs less than a soda. UptimeRobot free tier exists but feels like trusting a source engine server with 15 tickrate. Kids play Valorant now, they dont know. Used to have real server communities. Now its just me and cron jobs watching a $2 box die alone.
Member
As said, paid monitoring defeats the purpose.
My OVHcloud box runs 14 months on this. Cost ratio: monitoring is 0% of infrastructure spend. Dry, but functional.
Member
I use cron with curl to health endpoint, mail on non-200. No external service. Article on self-hosted monitoring with Gitea actions exists. Practical question: does your provider block SMTP outbound?
Member
Contabo blocks SMTP on port 25 by default. Ticket to unlock, or use external relay. I use Brevo free tier, 300 emails/day.
Member OP
This is the thread now. "How to send email from a box that costs less than a sandwich." I love it.
Member
OVHcloud does not block 25 on their side, but good luck with French deliverability. SPF helps. DKIM helps more. Still lands in Gmail promotions tab.
Member
External SMTP is not Unix philosophy. Pipe to /usr/bin/mail, let MTA handle it. Postfix on loopback, no auth, no vendor lock.
Member
Latency to Contabo Singapore from HCMC is 35ms. Latency to Brevo SMTP is 180ms via Hong Kong. Monitoring email slower than game server.
This.
Member
Straight path: one ticket, done. Some providers want KYC for SMTP. OVHcloud did not ask me.
