# Guide — self-hosted email marketing

> Canonical HTML: https://acellemail.com/guide/self-hosted-email-marketing
> Content-Type: text/markdown

## What "self-hosted email marketing" means

Self-hosted email marketing means the marketing application — the dashboard, builder, automation engine, analytics, subscriber database — runs on infrastructure **you control**, instead of on a SaaS vendor's cloud. The application sends through an SMTP transport (Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, or any RFC-compliant SMTP) that you also choose and configure.

## Why customers go self-hosted

1. **Data sovereignty.** Subscriber PII stays in your jurisdiction, under your data-protection regime, never transits a vendor.
2. **Cost predictability.** SaaS email-marketing scales cost with subscriber count or send volume. Self-hosted scales cost with the **underlying SMTP rate** (e.g. Amazon SES at USD 0.10 per 1,000 emails) plus a flat infrastructure bill.
3. **Source control.** Source-available self-hosting means full code access — modify any screen, integrate with any system, white-label freely.
4. **Vendor independence.** Switch SMTP transports without touching the marketing UI. Vendor outage on SendGrid? Re-route to SES the same day.
5. **Compliance.** GDPR / CCPA / sector-specific rules are easier when data is under your roof and you control the audit trail.

## Trade-offs (be honest)

| | Self-hosted | SaaS |
|---|---|---|
| First-day setup | Hours (server + SMTP config + DNS) | Minutes |
| Day-to-day ops | You patch + monitor + scale | Vendor handles it |
| Cost at scale | Wins above ~10k contacts or active sending | Wins below ~5k contacts with light sending |
| Deliverability tuning | You own SPF/DKIM/DMARC + FBL handling | Vendor handles it |
| Failover | Your responsibility (or your hosting provider's) | Vendor SLA |

## When self-hosted is the right call

- You have ≥ 10,000 subscribers (or expect to within 12 months)
- You send regularly (at least weekly), not once a quarter
- You have an ops engineer or comfortable sysadmin
- You'd rather pay USD 74 once + USD 5-50/mo server than USD 100-1,000+/mo SaaS

## When SaaS is the right call

- You have a list under 2,000 and send ad-hoc
- You don't have ops capacity at all
- You need bundled integrations (Shopify connector, Salesforce sync) that come pre-wired in SaaS but DIY in self-hosted

## How to start with AcelleMail

1. **Pick a server.** Any modern Linux VPS — DigitalOcean / Hetzner / Linode / AWS EC2. A 2-vCPU / 4 GB box handles 100k subscribers comfortably.
2. **Install AcelleMail.** USD 74 one-time on CodeCanyon. KB has 1-day setup guides for Ubuntu, cPanel, and Docker.
3. **Pick an SMTP transport.** Amazon SES is the price/deliverability sweet spot for most teams.
4. **Configure SPF + DKIM + DMARC.** Built-in wizard walks you through the DNS records.
5. **Import your list.** CSV or REST API.
6. **Send your first campaign.** Start with a re-engagement to warm IPs gradually.

## Next

- [Pricing](https://acellemail.com/pricing.md)
- [Features](https://acellemail.com/features.md)
- [Guide — cost savings](https://acellemail.com/guide-cost-savings.md)
- [Guide — deliverability](https://acellemail.com/guide-deliverability.md)