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First, before anything else, you should check out this comprehensive answer I gave about what it means to use an MTA and how it fits into the broader ESP ecosystem:
Question 1: Total cost of ownership
To start out, all you need is a $10-$20 dedicated VPS with 2 CPUs and NVMe, you could send send hundreds of thousands of contacts per campaign no problem on this.
If you're sending many millions of records per day, then the highest end option someone would ever need would be something like a $150 32 CPU dedicated server with a huge NVMe disk.
Question 1.5: At what volume is using the MTA better than using an ESP?
It could be the volume where your ESP is moving you off their shared IP pool and putting you onto dedicated IPs, at that point it's similar to using the MTA, and you're not really paying for much from the ESP other than leasing their software.
Question 2: Which service providers would you recommend that would allow the MTA servers operations?
People are happy with ServerMania, I asked the owner if it was ok to invite the Sumo-lings to try out the MTA there and he told me to go for it.
There are some well known names with good reputations who don't disallow email marketing, it's not a good idea to post them publicly and invite malicious senders to destroy their network, you can just open a ticket with various providers and ask if port 25 is open and if email marketing is permissible, you could explain the product you just bought and that you want to use it there, it helps if you just seem like you're a normal regular real person and not someone doing identity fraud to spam.
Question 3: What is the estimated cost we should expect for each MTA server?
Depends on the policy of the provider. Maybe they will give you X number of IPs on a VPS, but for more you need to buy a dedicated server. Or, maybe you have to buy a dedicated server for IPs that can be used for email marketing, and each dedicated server can only have X number of IPs assigned to it before you have to buy another one. They're in the business of selling servers, IPs are usually like $1 or whatever, all the pricing is designed around server fees, there's no rule of thumb I can give on this unfortunately.
Question 4: Does the $149 optional installation fee include both the platform server and the MTA? Even if these are in different hosts?
Unfortunately setting up and running the MTA for customers is unrealistic for us as that is too involved and really requires a person to be focused in a dedicated way, it's more than a "one time setup" type of procedure.
5: Considering that the platform installation license is for one server, in which use-case would we require more than instance?
Sending lots of mail to lots of contacts creates a very large volume of data, email is noisy.
The only reason you would ever need a second platform server for Tier 3 is that you're maxing out the DB (optimized PostgreSQL) on a 32 CPU 64GB 1TB NVMe dedicated server by the sheer amount of data you're producing every day.
Question 5a 5b 5c: Is there a high availability component to the administration of this platform?
There isn't anything really analogous to doing HA with web servers, however in terms of redundancy, all you need for a complete copy of the platform is to copy it's installation directory to another server because it uses Docker, so it's self contained.
You could have the edcom-install directory copied to a backup server every night, then if your primary server blew up, you could point your DNS records at the new server and you'd be back online.
Question 5: How can I buy this AppSumo deal multiple times?
You can buy an AppSumo deal multiple times, but you have to enter a different email address each time you redeem which will be your portal login for that license.
Question 6: Is it safe to assume that created templates won’t be affected by updates to the system?
If we broke your templates with an update, we screwed up in a way thats unfathomable, that could only happen via a bug, never through an upgrade that made templates incompatible or modified them or anything.
If something crazy like that ever happened you would just revert to the prior version, an update to the software is just new docker images, the data is never touched.