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Case study

How Forward Email cut infrastructure costs and supercharged performance with DataPacket

Forward Email outgrew cloud block storage. I/O became the bottleneck; logs lagged by 5-30 mins, costs rose faster than value. DataPacket rebuilt the foundation on dedicated NVMe servers, delivering severalfold storage throughput gains, instant operational visibility, full hardware control, a lower monthly bill, and predictable pricing, all backed by DataPacket’s hands-on engineering support.

Forward Email is an open-source, privacy-first email service for security-conscious teams and individuals. It powers email for 500,000+ domains using a deliberately strict design: each mailbox is separately encrypted and isolated for maximum control.

Portraif of Simon Rybisar
Client’s account manager Simon Rybisar
The results
-80% database costs
0 sec log delay
+179-573% read/write speeds

Forward Email’s Technical Whitepaper opens with a clear mission to transform how email privacy and security are handled. On the surface, everything speaks in standard protocols like SMTP/IMAP/POP3. The way the RFCs intended. But underneath, the storage layer tells a very unconventional story: each mailbox lives in its own SQLite database, encrypted with ChaCha20-Poly1305, layered on top of LUKS-encrypted disks.

Its privacy-first philosophy has attracted a community of technically demanding, security-conscious users. Since its founding in 2017, Forward Email has grown to power email for more than 500,000 domains, including Canonical, The Linux Foundation, and major universities. As founder Nicholas Baugh put it:

I built this for myself originally, and it’s amazing to see it resonate with so many people. The fact that we can build a sustainable business while staying 100% open-source, transparent, and privacy-focused – that’s what I’m most proud of.

Yet the privacy-by-design architecture also backed the team into a corner: they were trying to run thousands of small, encrypted SQLite databases on top of generic cloud block storage. That led to a common occurrence within the cloud world: as usage grew, that setup turned into lagging logs, IO bottlenecks, and storage bills that scaled faster than revenue. That is usually when companies come to us at DataPacket: when they need an infrastructure stack that supports long-term growth, not just a short-term workaround.

The difficulties of the cloud

It served us well in the beginning, but as we scaled, we hit limitations it just couldn’t solve. The block storage performance was killing us. I/O reads and writes were slow, impacting the whole service, Baugh described the former setup. For users, it meant higher latency in email delivery and slower IMAP/POP3 connections. And the delayed logging was brutal for the ops team. When you’re running a large-scale email service, you need real-time visibility. Those 30-minute delays in real-time logging made troubleshooting a nightmare, he elaborated.

But the problems did not end there. The bigger issues had to do with flexibility and scalability. The Cloud Service Provider (“CSP”) in question did not offer the storage volumes they needed as SQLite usage grew, and, as Baugh said, Once you scaled up on things like storage, you couldn’t scale back down. They also needed the freedom to repurpose IPs with great reputation for other roles in the systems architecture – but the old setup simply did not support that. Nor could they implement LUKS encryption, which was a major stumbling block for a privacy-first service like Forward Email.

All the symptoms pointed to fundamental limitations of a cloud-based block storage architecture for this kind of workload. The solution had to be effective. It had to increase performance, security, scalability, and flexibility while cutting infrastructure costs. As Baugh put it, It had to be too good to be true. A switch to bare metal offered that promise, but DataPacket still had to meet a defined set of criteria.

The non-negotiable criteria

Strong single‑core performance.

Because Forward Email’s application layer is built on Node.js and the asynchronous, single-threaded nature of the environment places a strong emphasis on it, single-core performance was absolutely critical. This factor alone put DataPacket’s dedicated servers in a strong position, powered as they were at the time by AMD Ryzen CPUs, before we made the full transition to AMD EPYC CPUs. The faster Baugh and his team could process requests for protocols like SMTP, IMAP, and POP3, the lower the end‑to‑end latency.

Consistently fast NVMe SSDs.

The reason is embedded in Forward Email’s storage layer: SQLite. That in itself is a huge departure from how most email services operate; they either use legacy mbox setups or user data sits in a shared database alongside every other user. Forward Email treats each mailbox as a fully separate unit. That means a separate file, a separate encryption key that is never stored in plaintext on disk, and separate access controls. Thousands of small, encrypted SQLite databases like that put continuous pressure on storage.

Fully customizable hardware.

Another key requirement was having full control over the hardware. Think of the ability to swap drives, expand storage without redesigning everything, or run LUKS full‑disk encryption on every NVMe device.

Data sovereignty and compliance.

With users in the EU and within the US federal government, GDPR and Section 889 compliance were critical for Forward Email. They needed a provider that met those requirements and helped them avoid prohibited vendors.

Cost efficiency and scalability.

Finally, there was the question of economics. Baugh and his team needed a flexible infrastructure model where adding capacity was straightforward, right‑sizing was possible, and the monthly bill tracked value instead of punishing growth.

Taken together, these requirements made it clear why the typical multi-tenant cloud setup was looking like the wrong tool for the job. The logical move for Forward Email was an infrastructure that Baugh and his team could tune end-to-end. And that’s where we came in.

Are you experiencing similar challenges in the cloud? High expenses? Unpredictable performance? Lack of customization? It may be time to move away from cloud. With our 24/7 engineer support, the shift is easier than you think.

The move off the cloud

By the time Baugh and DataPacket started discussing migration, he had already done a lot of groundwork.

I explored a lot of options. Toured datacenters, even looked into running clusters of Apple Silicon Mac Minis. But bare metal was the answer. Swappable drives, storage expansion, full control over the hardware.
Nicholas Baugh, founder of Forward Email

Although Baugh understood the benefits of dedicated servers, the true tipping point for him was Mullvad’s endorsement. Mullvad VPN was already a DataPacket client by the time Forward Email was looking to switch. He explained, The fact that Mullvad uses DataPacket was a huge vote of confidence. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us.

Forward Email would get exceptional throughput with high-capacity NVMe SSDs while Ryzen 7600 CPUs (now EPYC 4244Ps) would handle the single-threaded Node.js workloads. DataPacket’s location in Denver had all the hardware and connectivity to minimize latency for users across the US – and having all servers in the same location would ensure performance and overall reliability of the storage layer. But…

There was no but. Baugh said, I had great conversations with Simon [COO at DataPacket] over Slack. He really took the time to understand our needs and work with us. That personal attention is something you don’t get from the big cloud providers. Once he and his team realized they could get better performance and more security, scalability, predictability, and control for less money than they were paying for the slow and expensive cloud block storage, a switch to DataPacket’s bare metal solution was a no-brainer.

Forward Email announced a maintenance window to move their server infrastructure from the original CSP to DataPacket, and in that single step, changed where every mailbox lived.

From lagging logs to stellar performance

A direct and immediate impact that Forward Email noticed was how much faster the storage layer became. Cached read speeds almost tripled (from roughly 10.7 GB/s to 29.8 GB/s), buffered reads became more than 6 times faster (from about 0.53 GB/s to 3.56 GB/s), and sustained write speeds jumped from around 0.49 GB/s to roughly 1.5 GB/s. Baugh and his team went ahead and published the full numbers in a public status repository. Here is a before-and-after comparison for easy reference.

Test / Metric
Cached reads
Before
(legacy cloud setup)
10,665.90 MB/s
After
(DataPacket)
29,765.17 MB/s
Improve­ment
+179% (~2.8× faster)
Test / Metric
Buffered reads
Before
(legacy cloud setup)
527.82 MB/s
After
(DataPacket)
3,555.33 MB/s
Improve­ment
+573% (~6.7× faster)
Test / Metric
Write speed
Before
(legacy cloud setup)
487 MB/s
After
(DataPacket)
1,500 MB/s
Improve­ment
+215% (~3× faster)

Disk performance benchmarks before vs after migrating to DataPacket

When you are running thousands of tiny, encrypted SQLite databases, a 3-6× performance improvement this deep in the stack is like widening the main highway. But the thing about dedicated servers is that they are not just faster, they are also more affordable and scalable than the old cloud setup. Instead of paying hidden storage taxes or rapidly mounting egress costs, Forward Email now runs on dedicated hardware with flat, predictable pricing. Real-time logging went from 5-30+ minute delays to instant. Emails are delivered faster, mailboxes are more responsive, and the whole system is more stable. Plus, we got the storage capacity we needed to scale, which the CSP just couldn’t provide, Baugh explained

Besides performance, there has been a change on the human side of things as well. Baugh described a level of support that felt more like an extended engineering team than a distant provider. During the initial deployment, the DataPacket team was hands-on, helping replace network cards and tune NIC ring buffers. That level of attention did not cease once the servers were in production. Support at DataPacket is not just about fast replies at noon, midnight, or even on New Year’s Eve; it is about having direct access to people who actually understand your stack. That is why from the first conversation through trial runs and day-to-day operations, clients get guidance and even dedicated Slack channels for quick collaboration.

DataPacket has been a game-changer, giving us the performance, security, and support we need to deliver a world-class email service.
Nicholas Baugh, founder of Forward Email

Infrastructure without compromise

Forward Email’s story is what happens when a performance-critical architecture finally gets the infrastructure it deserves. A storage layer built on thousands of individually encrypted SQLite databases, quantum-safe cryptography, and strict regional separation may not seem like the easiest thing to host, but with the right foundation, it becomes fast, predictable, and cost-effective. With the US cluster stable and battle-tested, Forward Email is rolling out the EU setup under a new domain at forwardemail.eu, and DataPacket is happy to help them scale, optimize, and expand.

Baugh mentioned a very specific sentence while collaborating on this case study. It went, We’ve proven you don’t have to compromise your principles to succeed. That line could sit on our office wall. DataPacket has always been about an infrastructure that delivers both performance and cost-effectiveness without forcing you to compromise. In a world of 1s and 0s, we are here for teams like Baugh’s that refuse to choose just one, and want a world’s leading network behind what they are building and the values it is built on.

We’ve proven you don’t have to compromise your principles to succeed.
Nicholas Baugh, founder of Forward Email

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