dedicated email service?

[-Anti-]

Our school has a VPS and will eventually be running two community-orientated drupal websites on it, with a daily user-base of 600 users; I envisage a maximum of between 30-60 simultaneous users. I'm not entirely sure VPS is going to manage to be able to serve the websites (which are still in development) if they get very busy. I think so, but I'm not 100% confident.

However, on top of that, we also provide email for 20 staff, for fairly light internal usage. This is ok, but yesterday I was confronted with the notion that all our pupils should have emails at our domain, and the filter turned on so that they can only send/receive email within our domain.

My initial reaction is that I don't think our server will be able to handle 400-500 daily email users (bearing in mind also, that most emails will have documents attached). Further, no-one has a fixed computer to work at, so all these accounts will be accessed through the roundcube webmail provided by cpanel, and so all the emails will be left on the server until deleted by users.

Therefore, if they really want to pursue an email solution, I'm going to suggest paying for a third party dedicated email server, which may cost hundreds of euros.

Personally I'm not happy about using email at all, and think we should be using an alternative mode of communication for the children, such as teacher blogs or forums on our websites.

Any second opinions?
You think a VPS would be able to handle this amount of website/email usage?

[Jack]

I think VPS won't be enough to host emails as well as websites considering no. of online users and your other requirements. Due to virtual environment you will face performance issues as well. Alternatively, I would recommend you to consider a single Dedicated Server to host your websites as well as emails. You can cancel your VPS and consider a single Dedicated Server.

Dedicated server as a physical server is certainly more powerful than a virtual server. You won't be sharing the server with any other users which will allow you total control and flexibility. You will have full roots access to manage your server. We'll help you with migration as well. All your data, emails including cPanel settings will be migrated.

[Vrytek]

Have you considered Google Apps?

[-Anti-]

Thanks for confirmation that a VPS isn't probably enough for such a community + email.
Also, thanks for the google apps suggestion - I'll look into that.

[srichards]

Just to go out of the box a bit. How about using Moodle? It is an online learning environment and might be ideal for allowing pupils to interact with each other and with staff. Drupal is quite resource heavy, I have used it on a number of sites.

It depends on what goals you have and whether the community is internal or internal and external as to how you go about it. A forum is probably the easiest answer and there is a module for drupal to use phpbb so once the pupils register themselves or are registered for drupal then they are automatically sorted out for phpbb if you set it up how drupal wants. Phpbb has private messaging and you can limit the inbox size. 600 pupils with 5mb each is 3 gig. It will also stop the issue of the function creep so that pupils won't have the option to email outside as they won't be using email

I used these people for personal email hosting for a while: The Very Good Email Company They're geared up to do proper business wide email hosting. Don't know what their charges are though.

[-Anti-]

Thanks for the informative reply.

At some point in the future I was perhaps going to install moodle too, for those teachers who wanted it. However, it is quite a complex piece of software for the teachers to learn and use. One of our IT teachers trialled it last year, and whilst *he* liked it, I had to support a lot of students who found it difficult to use. It was also quite un-themable, inflexible, and had minor security concerns.

My idea was to use teacher blogs as the mainstay of our community. Along with drupal's tagging, and making lists of nodes with Views, students will easily be able to find the posts intended for them. I feel forums are older technology; there has been a paradigm shift in the last couple of years, and I'd rather build something that was more future-proof and more akin to the type of sites that the students are used to using. When polled, almost none of them belonged to any traditional forums, but nearly all belonged to social networking sites. So that's the direction I thought we should go.

However, you do note some powerful features of phbb that are difficult to do with drupal.

[srichards]

Ah. Moodle was quite hard to customise. Staff and students found it easier to use generally than Blackboard/WebCT which went campus wide later. I think a lot of VLEs are much more complicated to use than they could be.

Just had a google around and found this: Elgg - Open Source Social Networking and Social Publishing Platform. Seems to be social networking aimed at education. Never heard of it before.

You're right about the paradigm shift. I have noticed that traditional forums are much quieter than they used to be. Everyone seems to be on twitter or facebook instead

I found drupal a bit tricky until I got the CCK, custom content module. Made things much easier as you could generate templates for content and link them to other content. Did all the course and module descriptions using it along with one of the classification modules that did built in menus. Made life much easier.