Almost every “best VPS for email marketing” page starts with CPU and RAM. That is the wrong end. What you run decides what you need — and four of the six popular packages cannot send a single message on their own. Here is the honest comparison, then the plan that fits each one.
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Campaign apps need an MTA or a relay behind them
If you want free, open-source bulk email software written in PHP, that is Mautic — GPL v3, no licence fee. If you want the least to maintain, listmonk is AGPL v3 and ships as one Go binary with a Postgres database. Both are campaign applications: they build and schedule mail but hand it to an SMTP server or relay to deliver. If you want open-source software that delivers the mail itself, that is Postal, MIT licensed, which is a full mail server. Sendy ($69 one-time) and MailWizz ($89 one-time, or $275 if you resell access) are commercial PHP applications, and PowerMTA is a commercial MTA sold by quote for high-volume senders.
Related: Email marketing VPS · SMTP VPS · Port 25 · rDNS · How many emails can a VPS send?
This trips up more self-hosted email projects than any specification. The two jobs are separate, and most of these packages only do one of them.
Manage subscribers, build the message, segment the list, schedule the send and report on it. Then they hand the mail to something else. Mautic, listmonk, MailWizz and Sendy all work this way. Installing one of these and expecting mail to leave the server is the single most common mistake.
Talk SMTP to the receiving world: queue messages, retry failures, honour throttling, handle bounces and manage which IP each message leaves from. Postal and PowerMTA are MTAs, as are Postfix and Exim. This is the layer that needs Port 25 and a clean IP.
Every figure here was taken from the vendor's own documentation in August 2026, and each entry links to its source. Where a vendor does not publish a number, this says so rather than estimating one.
| Software | Licence | Cost | Stack | Database | Sends mail itself? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mautic Open-source marketing automation, not just newsletters. | GPL v3 | Free | PHP | MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.2+ (InnoDB) | No — needs an MTA or relay |
| listmonk One Go binary and a Postgres database. That is the whole install. | AGPL v3 | Free | Go (single self-contained binary) | PostgreSQL 12 or newer | No — needs an MTA or relay |
| MailWizz The established commercial choice for running your own sending platform. | Commercial (CodeCanyon Regular or Extended licence) | $89 one-time | PHP | n/a | No — needs an MTA or relay |
| Sendy A thin, cheap front end for Amazon SES. | Commercial (one-time licence) | $69 one-time | PHP | MySQL or MariaDB | No — needs an MTA or relay |
| Postal A complete open-source mail server — your own Mailgun. | MIT | Free | Docker and Docker Compose | MariaDB 10.6 or higher — the project states plainly that MySQL is not supported in its place | Yes — it is an MTA |
| PowerMTA The commercial high-volume MTA. Priced accordingly. | Commercial, owned by Bird (previously Port25, then SparkPost) | Quote only | Native MTA daemon | n/a | Yes — it is an MTA |
Automation: multi-step campaigns, lead scoring, forms, landing pages, CRM integrations.
The heaviest of the six to run and to learn. Mautic states plainly that it should not be installed on shared hosting.
By far the simplest to deploy and keep running. Very fast, very light, genuinely open source.
Deliberately lean. No visual automation builder, and Postgres rather than MySQL may not suit an existing stack.
Mature, heavily documented, and built for many lists, many sending servers and multiple customers.
Not open source, and one month of support is included by default — extending it costs extra.
Cheapest way to get a decent campaign interface on top of SES pricing.
You are tied to a relay. If your reason for self-hosting is to control delivery yourself, Sendy is the wrong tool — it is a front end, not a mail server.
Real delivery control — your own IPs, your own queues, message tracking and an HTTP API, with no per-message fee.
The heaviest requirements here: 2 CPU cores, 4 GB RAM and 25 GB disk are the documented minimum. You now run a mail server, with everything that implies.
Per-domain throttling, granular IP pool management and detailed delivery accounting at volumes where those things decide whether mail lands.
The cost only makes sense at genuine scale, and you still need campaign software on top.
Sized from the vendor's published requirements, not from a sales target. Every plan name, specification and price below is generated from the same data as our pricing page.
Contact and event tables grow fast, and automation runs constantly in the background.
Business NVMe VPS
2 Cores · 2 GB RAM
30 GB NVMe · 10 Gbps Port
$12.95/mo
A Go binary and Postgres are comfortable on a single core; NVMe keeps subscriber queries quick.
Starter NVMe VPS
1 Core · 2 GB RAM
20 GB NVMe · 10 Gbps Port
$9.95/mo
+ $1.00 one-time setup
Matches the documented minimum almost exactly — 2 cores and 4 GB — with NVMe for MariaDB and the queue.
Business NVMe VPS
2 Cores · 2 GB RAM
30 GB NVMe · 10 Gbps Port
$12.95/mo
Dedicated cores and dedicated RAM. Anyone paying for a PowerMTA licence is past the point of sharing a host node.
Business VDS (Xeon E5)
2 Cores · 4 GB Dedicated RAM
60 GB NVMe · 10 Gbps Port
$32.95/mo
Every plan includes full root access, a dedicated IPv4 address and open Port 25, and no plan includes backups. See all 16 plans · ask before you order if you are unsure which fits.
What each vendor states, with the source, so you can check it rather than take our word.
Sources, checked 17 August 2026
Read at each vendor's own documentation rather than taken from a summary. Follow the links and check for yourself — figures like these move.
From $4.95 a month, with root access from the first second so you can install whichever of these you picked — and a 7-day money-back guarantee if it turns out not to suit you.
