I stopped hosting web sites commercially over a decade ago, but have been using Virtualmin to manage my own sites in the mean-time. Now I see an opportunity and I’m getting back into that business, and I have questions related to creating new virtual servers automatically:
Question One: When creating a new virtual server LetsEncrypt SSL issuance fails because Virtualmin is requesting certs for admin. and webmail. subdomains even though those don’t exist. Where do I go to just disable these domains at creation, or is there a simpler way like telling the letsencrypt module to just skip those subdomains?
Question Two: I gave up on hosting my own e-mail a couple of years ago (it seems Gmail and MS randomly flag small hosts as spammers, or I’m just really bad at email hosting), but I’ll make this available to clients via a third party e-mail add-on. I’ve looked through server templates and plans and I can’t find a place to configure “don’t offer e-mail services in Virtualmin because that will just confuse folks.” Is there a place to disable all e-mail for new clients?
Question Three: Once things are running I’ll buy Pro licenses to support the effort here. I’ve got 2 Virtualmin installs running - one for hosting, and one that’s nothing but a BIND slave. Do I need licenses for both, or just for the one that’s hosting web sites?
Thanks folks. Virtualmin has allowed me to mostly ignore the platform hosting my web sites, but digging around lately I’ve seen lots of improvements over years past. This is great.
Are you hosting the DNS yourself? If so, those subdomains should already be created. Otherwise you can of course create the with your DNS provider or under Server Configuration → SSL Certificate → Let’s Encrypt you can select manually which domains it should request a certificate for.
For this the easiest would be to just disable everything email related during the creation of the virtual server.
Under System Settings → Features and Plugins you can also disable Mail for domain.
You probably weren’t bad at email hosting, but yes, MS is a particularly shitty provider to send emails to. They will randomly either flag you, or they will accept your email just fine then throw it into space, never delivering it to your inbox (even when listed as an accepted sender). Gmail at least gives you a hint of the reason for rejecting.
I would actually advice AGAINST using Virtualmin on the slave (if that’s all it’s used as). Just install the OS, Webmin and follow this clicky for the setup. It vastly reduces the resource usage of the server, and of course the attack surface.
In any case you would just need a pro license for the server that actually hosts stuff.
Just a note re hosting your own email.
We also used to get listed as spam email by gmail until we took the plunge and went through the process of creating all the right security setups (eg SPF, DMARC, Relaying etc).
We have been running our virtualmin postfix email server for almost 2 years now and haven’t yet been flagged as spammers by gmail.
It will take a bit of effort and learning to get it set up correctly, but in the end its definitely worth it.
(mxtoolbox.com is a great resource to assist with this setup)
