MPSTME ACM infrastructure

A student chapter’s tech usually lives on whoever’s personal accounts set it up, and leaves when they graduate. When I became ACM MPSTME’s Webmaster in 2025, I moved the chapter onto infrastructure it runs itself. I still run it now as Chairperson, and it has grown well past ACM.

What it runs

• Coolify, a self-hosted PaaS. The chapter’s apps deploy from the chapter’s GitHub organization, which I set up along with its GitHub Apps and CI/CD. It hosts the chapter website, the Discord bot, and apps for other committees and clubs, including the college’s Railway Concession system.
• Mailcow, our own mail server. I configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC myself so mail from it is actually delivered. It now handles mail for 7–9 college committees.
• An @mpstmeacm.com address for every member. Each ACM member gets their own mailbox on that server. Because it’s self-hosted, adding a member doesn’t add a per-seat licence.
• A members-only Discord. Custom bots onboard new members and grant channel access by position and department, so nobody hands out roles by hand. More on that on the Discord bots page.
• A members-only Minecraft server for 2026–27: players must link their Minecraft account to Discord through the chapter’s bot, which exists only inside the ACM Discord server, so only members can get in.

Why it matters

None of these is hard on its own. What matters is that the chapter owns them: the domain, the mailboxes, the deploy platform and the community spaces stay with ACM when a committee hands over to the next one, and other committees can use them without each paying for their own.

I wrote the full story (what I set up, what I learnt about email deliverability, and who depends on it now) in Running MPSTME ACM on its own infrastructure.

Self-hosting doesn’t remove the cost. It turns a monthly bill into a responsibility, and someone has to take that responsibility on.