I had been thinking about cutting costs in regards to internet servers for a while now. After the Linode incident earlier this year, I decided to move away from Linode. I did not leave because their service was bad (it was actually pretty good), but because of the way they handle security. I found prgmr and signed up for a six-month run with them -- they were $2/mo less than Linode and provided (at the time) the same resources. I am nearing the end of the six-month run and while prgmr (still can't get used to the name) has been good, I wanted to lighten the costs a bit more. Plus, for the money, prgmr just does not provide the same resources as other places.
The important things for me were email for my mom, my wife and myself (plus some forwarding accounts for friends); my personal landing page; a business page for family; and to a lesser extent this blog which has been around for a while.
At first, I tried using nearlyfreespeech.net for all of the above. It worked great for everything, except I have serious control issues, so I moved mail serving from nearlyfreespeech.
nearlyfreespeech is really a webhosting provider, the extent of their mail services is mail forwarding. It was not too expensive to do the forwarding (two cents per domain per day) but I really like to have control over my mail -- custom spamassassin rules and all -- so, I got a Digital Ocean account and fired up an instance. I have more than enough resources to do both mail and web serving, but I want to keep it single-purpose for now.
The webhosting stays with nearlyfreespeech because I like their pay-for-what-you-use model for webhosting.
From what I estimate, it will cost about $1.25 per month to host the websites I needed at nearlyfreespeech and $5 per month to have the virtual host at Digital Ocean. Not bad when compared to paying prgmr $18 a month or Linode $20 a month for around the same service.
In other news, I am moving away from Google+ which is nice, but outside of a few cool people (here's looking at you Jacob, Maryah and Mario), I was really kind of there alone. My family and friends still use Twitter (and Facebook). So, I am returning to Twitter for my short blurbs and this blog for long-form writing.