in-house civicrm install - but remote email install?

Question

I've got a decent sized database (170,000 contacts) and I've been thinking lately of ways I could speed it up. Right now I'm on a VPS host with 4GB of ram and it runs... pretty good actually. But there are a handful of things that do take a while. So, I'm looking at upgrading the server to 8GB, but that increases our monthly costs of course.

So, I started thinking about running civicrm locally in my office. I have a spare computer laying around the office the office that would run a LAMP stack REALLY well and would run this civicrm install really well. I could probably put 16GB of ram in it for pretty cheap. This would work really well for us as we only use it as a private constituent management. We don't use contributions or events so people from the outside world don't really need to touch it. We do import contributions and events when needed and that works really well.

The one thing people do from the outside world is click on our emails. We send out approx 250,000 emails a month from this server and that click/read/unsubscribe data is super valuable to us.

So my question is: how could I go about running my local database but still use my cloud host to track and I guess sync back to my local database for click events and email opens events? Is this even possible? Even if I switch to using a 3rd party smtp, the click events are still based on the CMS civicrm install, right?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

you could have a look at an extension called CiviProxy we developed a while ago. The major focus is on security as it enbables you to run CiviCRM without having to make your environment publically available.

However, most interesting for you is probably the fact that it enables pass-through of tracking data on opening and click-through rates as well as Sign-on and off of your newsletter (Webpage templates).

Please find more information on the github page and in this recorded video presentation.