Saving Money in the Cloud

The time has come for my family to work hard at shrinking our monthly expenditures. One of the items I decided to give the axe to was my current web hosting. I only pay $8 per month for hosting at A2Hosting and the service has been excellent but I think I’m okay with letting it go.

Prior to coming to this decision, I analyzed what I was using the web hosting for and what alternatives I could use that are free. First, the services that I was using the hosting for include:

• Email
• Web Site
• Wiki
• Blog
• File Storage
• Playing around with web based apps

First on the list is email. I only had a single address that I was using and it wasn’t actually being used per se. The only activity it ever saw was the result of my Gmail account automatically forwarding copies of all received messages for backup. So, I decided it wasn’t critical and left it open to removal.

Next web come to the actual web part of the web hosting. I have yet to decided on what content to put at the site so if you happened to browse to the domain, you’d only see a logo that I had created from a photo taken in Colorado while on vacation.

Mediawiki was being run on the site for a personal notebook of mostly programming related notes. There are a couple of free hosted wikis such as socialtext.net, and pbwiki.com. I had previously created an account at pbwiki.com and had no complaints so I figured it would make a decent substitute.

File storage was not an absolute requirement and actually quite low on the list of priorities but when then it dawned on me that Microsoft had announced they were increasing the storage capacity of Windows Live SkyDrive to 25GB soon. So that would be more than adequate for my uses.

Running Wordpress on my own web site was almost replaced with the hosted version at wordpress.com but Blogger lets you use a personal domain without the $10 per year charge.

I guess there is no real substitute if you want to play around with self-hosted web applications. Fortunately I dual boot Linux on all my machines so I can still play that way. It’s just going to have to do for now.

So that would have been the end of it. Except then it dawned on me, Google offers the Google Apps service for free. With Google Apps, I can use Gmail for email, Sites for web and wiki, Calendar, and Docs. I’ll still use SkyDrive for basic files but everything else is pretty much covered.

Now, I just have to hope that Google is kind with my soul after having handed to them.