# Why go self-hosted?

**What are some of the advantages of self-hosting?**&#x20;

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No plans. No gates. No unlocks. No upsells. No monthly minimums.
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If you send 1,000 messages a day or 1,000,000, all of the features of the software are available from day one.

No monthly billing just to maintain future access.&#x20;

No SaaS sales team breathing down your neck as you scale, looking for a whale.

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Resell it to others at minimal cost to yourself.&#x20;
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When you white-label an ESP, you pay the ESP a fixed CPM, and then you charge someone else more than that, pocketing the difference.&#x20;

Your ESP may require contracts, mandatory minimums, monthly commitments to lower the CPM you pay, and additional charges for bundled services and technology; as a white-labeler of an Enterprise ESP, you may be expected to buy into the entire infrastructure.&#x20;

With EmailDelivery.com, you can charge your ESP customers a CPM to send over dedicated IPs that cost you $2 a month running on a VPS that costs $35 a year, and they'll never know the difference.&#x20;

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Freedom! You set the content rules.&#x20;
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The list of prohibited verticals at ESPs can be quite lengthy:&#x20;

Loans, mortgages, cryptocurrencies, nutraceuticals, investments, stocks, and trading, dating, adult content, debt, credit repair, gambling, lead generation, affiliate marketing, and many other restrictions placed on lawful areas of business they disfavor.&#x20;

This is your ESP, where you run the show.&#x20;

You set the content policies, not a faceless compliance team firewalled behind corporate gatekeepers and capricious gobbledegook.&#x20;

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Privacy.&#x20;
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No one has access to your ESP but you and those who you grant access to it, not even us. &#x20;

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Avoid Vendor Lock-in.
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Swap in and out any email API, SMTP Relay, MTA, and IP addresses from anywhere in the world at will.&#x20;

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Bring marketing in-house.
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Slash costs and dependencies on third parties who make surprise pricing and policy changes all the time.&#x20;

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Direct logs and DB access.
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There's no middleman between you and your data.&#x20;

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Continuity and disaster recovery.&#x20;
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Control and customize your backup and redundancy strategy.&#x20;

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Compliance.&#x20;
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Use a server in a GDPR region, or on-premises in your own data center.

Keep sensitive data safe while maintaining established security standards, practices, and policies.&#x20;

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Portability.&#x20;
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Move your existing installation between servers, upgrade or downgrade your hardware at will, you decide what server your software runs on and how much it costs, if anything. &#x20;

**Wasn't the SaaS model created to be a superior alternative to self-hosting?**

The SaaS model was created as a business opportunity, but 95%+ of SaaS businesses fail and shut down.&#x20;

Our software is yours forever.&#x20;

No waking up to an announcement in your inbox one day about the impending loss of your investment with a deadline for getting your data out before it's deleted.&#x20;

<figure><img src="/files/NIXVddnTMj7fJDJO7boD" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

Even without future updates, our software would continue to work for as long as the underlying technology it relies on remains available. This could be as long as a decade.  &#x20;

Until fairly recently in internet history, everything was self-hosted; It's how all of us got here.&#x20;

**Can someone install this for me?**

We offer professional services.

**What's the installation like?**

To install the ESP platform yourself, you connect to an Ubuntu Linux VPS using SSH on macOS or PuTTY on Windows, then copy and paste the 5 commands shown in our installation documentation, which includes screenshots of each step.&#x20;

The Digital Ocean Droplet Console is excellent and can be used as an alternative to SSH.&#x20;

Once the installation is complete, you need to create a DNS record pointing to the IP address of your VPS, just like if you were naming your WordPress site in Cloudflare, Namecheap, or GoDaddy.&#x20;

**How does backup and restore work?**&#x20;

Thanks to the magic of Docker, everything in the ESP platform lives under one directory called edcom-install.&#x20;

To back up your ESP you just shut it down and move the edcom-install directory somewhere.&#x20;

That somewhere could be an external disk, another VPS, a secure backup service like SpiderOak, a Dropbox, or whatever works.&#x20;

To restore your ESP, you just install docker on your VPS and retrieve the edcom-install directory from your backup; that's it.&#x20;

It's also common for hosting providers to have a native backup solution or snapshot capabilities for a small fee.&#x20;

**What are the maintenance requirements?** &#x20;

This section will be updated soon.


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