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I’ve spent the last cou­ple weeks mov­ing off of my exist­ing server(s) and into the cloud. Previously, I had been using my own Zimbra server, own SVN/trac install, and web­sites, albeit vir­tu­al­ized on a shared XEN server. The phys­i­cal server all this was run­ning on was some ancient second-hand single-core i386 Dell pow­eredge which never had enough RAM, cyles or bandwidth.

For this, I paid a friend of mine $30/mo. Recently, the fourth per­son in our arrange­ment dropped out and so our costs went up to $40/mo. Now, I had 768Mb worth of mem­ory on the two vir­tual machines I had, of which I was only actu­ally using one.

So I was pay­ing $40/mo for a sin­gle VM instance I ran SCM and my web­site off of, and my e-mail. That’s dumb, since you can use pri­vate repos on Github for $7/mo, use Gmail for free (all things equal, web­mail is web­mail), and get a pri­vate VM instance on Linode for $17/mo.

So that’s what I did: I cut my costs in half over the self-hosted solu­tion by putting shit online.

Now, if me and my friends had kicked in a lot more $ and got­ten a real server, and split it that 1RU up more aggres­sively, then it would have been cheaper to do that our­selves. But nobody cared enough about that to make it work, so putting it else­where is cheaper.

Which is a gen­er­al­ized con­clu­sion I’m will­ing to draw: if nobody cares, it’s cheaper to pay some­one to do it than to mud­dle through your­self. If some­one does care, then it’s invari­ably going to be cheaper to DIY.