Can't beat the cloud

I have decided it is time to stop running my own web server just for my silly little blog. And that was about the only reason I'm still renting a virtual server from Slicehost (err Rackspace). At $20/month it just doesn't make much sense anymore.

So I've moved the blog onto Blogger, static files onto AWS S3, and some small URL redirection glue onto Google AppEngine. With free DNS hosting provided by my registrar, free blog hosting at Blogger, and free redirection glue on AppEngine, I can cut my costs by nearly $20/month. The only real cost is the static files on S3, which is just a couple of tiny images. I fortunately have never had a very media rich site. Given S3's prices, this is pennies/month.

The domain's email was moved months ago onto Google Apps for Your Domain. I just couldn't keep SpamAssassin running with sufficiently up-to-date rules on a tiny virtual server with only 256 MB of memory allocated to it. Fortunately, Gmail works great over IMAP and direct SMTP. And I do like having the fast web based search every once in a while.

This means the git.spearce.org experiment will be going away soon. Most likely I'll keep my Git repositories at GitHub, or repo.or.cz. Fortunately these are small and generally just mirrors of open source projects whose primary repository lives elsewhere.