# Why go self-hosted? **What are some of the advantages of self-hosting?** {% hint style="success" %} No plans. No gates. No unlocks. No upsells. No monthly minimums. {% endhint %} 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. No SaaS sales team breathing down your neck as you scale, looking for a whale. {% hint style="success" %} Resell it to others at minimal cost to yourself. {% endhint %} 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. 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. 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. {% hint style="success" %} Freedom! You set the content rules. {% endhint %} The list of prohibited verticals at ESPs can be quite lengthy: 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. This is your ESP, where you run the show. You set the content policies, not a faceless compliance team firewalled behind corporate gatekeepers and capricious gobbledegook. {% hint style="success" %} Privacy. {% endhint %} No one has access to your ESP but you and those who you grant access to it, not even us. {% hint style="success" %} Avoid Vendor Lock-in. {% endhint %} Swap in and out any email API, SMTP Relay, MTA, and IP addresses from anywhere in the world at will. {% hint style="success" %} Bring marketing in-house. {% endhint %} Slash costs and dependencies on third parties who make surprise pricing and policy changes all the time. {% hint style="success" %} Direct logs and DB access. {% endhint %} There's no middleman between you and your data. {% hint style="success" %} Continuity and disaster recovery. {% endhint %} Control and customize your backup and redundancy strategy. {% hint style="success" %} Compliance. {% endhint %} 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. {% hint style="success" %} Portability. {% endhint %} 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. **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. Our software is yours forever. 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.
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. Until fairly recently in internet history, everything was self-hosted; It's how all of us got here. **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. The Digital Ocean Droplet Console is excellent and can be used as an alternative to SSH. 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. **How does backup and restore work?** Thanks to the magic of Docker, everything in the ESP platform lives under one directory called edcom-install. To back up your ESP you just shut it down and move the edcom-install directory somewhere. That somewhere could be an external disk, another VPS, a secure backup service like SpiderOak, a Dropbox, or whatever works. To restore your ESP, you just install docker on your VPS and retrieve the edcom-install directory from your backup; that's it. It's also common for hosting providers to have a native backup solution or snapshot capabilities for a small fee. **What are the maintenance requirements?** This section will be updated soon.