AWS hosting?

[dbltoe]

Here is the cPanel pricing. This is in addition to the cost of your hosting:

https://www.cpanel.net/pricing/

You can get entire hosting with cPanel and much more for less than that price.

[fpbear]

The only problem is email - you can't send email directly from your instance. They have that blocked. Some will tell you to submit a support ticket and they will open the ports - but they won't. At least they wouldn't for me. The solution is to use Amazon SES. SES is an email proxy that is free for most users, and is a good idea anyway to prevent your emails from being blocked. You give the email to them, and they send it for you. This is configured in the Exim configuration so nothing to change in your cPanel accounts or email clients. Plenty of tutorials on that.

How did you connect SES to the zencart PHP mailer (Sendmail)? I followed the AWS document about integrating SES with Sendmail, and one of the required steps is to submit a support form to open up port 25. However my request was rejected for a not clear use case (I thought ecommerce confirmation emails would be a good use case). Is there a different way to connect SES to zencart?

[ChuckPhillips]

SES is integrated with your mail server, not Zen Cart. You configure Exim to send through SES:

http://https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/articles/360056322734-How-to-use-Amazon-SES-as-a-Smarthost

[fpbear]

Figured it out - I was able to get SES to work directly through ZenCart via the ZenCart smtpauth setting (no need for exim or sendmail).

Overall AWS EC2 works very nice for a ZenCart site and the pages load very fast. I'm also using a Global Accelerator and Application Load Balancer. The Global Accelerator provides two static IP addresses. My purpose for the LB is to make it easy to get and automatically renew an SSL cert. Using GA, I was able to register one of the IPs with the domain A record.

It just takes time to navigate through all the AWS menus and learn how to configure everything. I like EC2 better than LightSail because LightSail is glitchy.

[ChuckPhillips]

I'm very pleased with the performance of LightSail. The site is fast and consistently so. We are using the 16GB package.

Amazon SES, maybe not so much. Today a range of SES IP's got blacklisted and a few important emails got blocked. A little Googling and I find forum after forum of the very same problem going back to 2014 with no solutions provided by AWS. Apparently not much you can do - you're just screwed if they use one of the blacklisted IPs to send your email and the recipient happens to filter by that RBL.

I have not see any glitches in LightSail. YMMV.

[ChuckPhillips]

@fpbear, what about emails not sent from ZC?

[fpbear]

@fpbear, what about emails not sent from ZC?

We are using Rackspace Email hosting for email correspondence (via Outlook or webmail etc.) and now SES for emails originating from ZenCart. We are not using other applications to manage email (no mailing list manager etc.) but if we did, I suppose they could also use an authenticated SMTP protocol to talk to SES. Not sure why AWS has an obsolete document about how to configure SES for Sendmail on port 25 when they don't even support that use.

[ChuckPhillips]

Ours is a simpler setup. I have 11 cPanels on the server, each with some flavor of open source software. Things like support tickets, webmail, dev sites, etc...so integrating SES via Exim makes sense b/c I want all my server's email going through SES not just 1 ZC's. Many of us send customer service emails through Exim using other email clients. That came in handy when...

Yesterday a range of SES IPs were blacklisted by SORBS. Two of my clients filter by that RBL, causing bounces. A few Google searches revealed plenty of forum posts about that very topic going back to at least 2014. I could not find any input from AWS on the subject. I reported the IP's to SORBs but not much else I could do. These were customer service responses being sent to high profile domains, not ZC emails.

So I have switched to Postmark. So far looks pretty good, they charge a little bit, $10/10,000 emails, but at least my responses made it to my clients.

[dbltoe]

So I have switched to Postmark. So far looks pretty good, they charge a little bit, $10/10,000 emails, but at least my responses made it to my clients.

You may not be safe yet if your new setup does not include SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. All are items pertaining to email that properly identify you to any ISP. SPF is pretty standard, DKIM is about 50/50 but, DMARC is the one that will prevent your emails from being thrown in a bit bucket somewhere. Often, this happens with neither the sender nor receiver being notified.

Having all three set correctly can also help get you by the RBL checkers that are not current.

You can test by replacing YOUR_SITE in https://mxtoolbox.com/emailhealth/YOUR_SITE/ Sometimes, you will need to fill in the email or domain at mxtoolbox.

[ChuckPhillips]

100% agree, we have DKIM, SPF, rDNS, DMARC all configured and verified by MX Toolbox.