Hi Paul,I don't think the type of VPN that HideMyAss.com and those places offer will help you. They are more oriented towards browsing and, unless they have some additional offering that I did't notice, would not allow traffic initiated by others to reach you unless it is known to be in response to traffic you generated.
I've looked web hosting several times recently and the two I've come back to are csoft.net for shared hosting (starts at $5/month) and gandi.net for virtual machine hosting (starts at $14/month). Although a little more expensive than other choices, I like gandi.net for domain name registration (which I haven't done much of so YMMV) and they have some free services with registration if your needs are basic enough.
I like that csoft.net just alters the priority of your bandwidth based on your account level and does not charge for bandwidth usage over a specific amount (there is a bandwidth minimum per account type). I'm not entirely sure how this works out in practice (I had an account with them for a little while several years ago but didn't use it much), but I suspect that other providers do the same thing in addition to charging you extra if you go over bandwidth. You can relay through their mail server after authenticating over TLS and they support POP3 and IMAP. There are a few limitations of csoft hosting that do not apply to the Gandi cloud hosting, such as that you will not use it to backup your computer.
csoft.net advertises having NetBSD hosts available, but didn't actually when I last used them (they did have both OpenBSD and FreeBSD hosts then). They use a custom (open source) administration system and will implement feature change requests quickly if they meet their overall design philosophy. Their SSL setup has a few issues according to ssllabs.com analysis, but I hope they would quickly fix those too (you don't get SSL for your website until the $25/month level and at the $35/month level could presumably set it up how you want).
gandi.net only supports Linux variants. I'm not sure if it is possible to run unsupported OSes at all. They are xen based, but it sounds like they might have substantial local modifications.
These are at least the best I've been able to find with high functionality and low cost as the primary criteria.
-Matt On 2013-08-22 paul%whooppee.com@localhost wrote:
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 13:29:12 -0700 (PDT) From: Paul Goyette <paul%whooppee.com@localhost> To: netbsd-users%netbsd.org@localhost Subject: OT: Reliable Email/Web hosting service - recommendations?Some time next year, I'll be moving from the US to the Philippines. It is next-to-impossible to get static-IPv4 addresses, and IPv6-access for residential service is (apparently) even less likely.So, I've got a couple of options. One would be to "lease" a fixed address from a US-based company and set up a VPN-over-tunnel (HideMyAss.com for example).It seems easier to just have someone host my domain's mail and web services, and probably less expensive,too. But I really don't want to have to use web-based application for Email; I would much prefer using POP3 (via pkgsrc/fetchmail or similar) to pull mail, and send directly (via postfix).I would also prefer NOT to retain my current DNS services, and not have to transfer them the Email/Web hosting service.So, with all these requirements, does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations?------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Paul Goyette | PGP Key fingerprint: | E-mail addresses: | | Customer Service | FA29 0E3B 35AF E8AE 6651 | paul at whooppee.com | | Network Engineer | 0786 F758 55DE 53BA 7731 | pgoyette at juniper.net | | Kernel Developer | | pgoyette at netbsd.org | -------------------------------------------------------------------------