5typos.net
Cheeseburger hosting
One of the reasons I like my current blog host so much is the price. At $20 a year it comes out at less than $2 a month — that’s about the price of 2 basic cheeseburgers at most fast food chains in the US.
I’m currently looking at helping two projects that need a quick and nice looking site. It used to be that I’d host them at one of my servers, but experience1 has taught me that projects need their own infrastructure so they can move on without you.
The typical setup for a simple website is always a Wordpress blog, but the bottom price for a reliable host is around $6 a month. Yes, that’s low, but it does add up.
Even with the ability to use Google Cloud, or Amazon Web Services, the basic budget starts at $5. For all the talk about the web democratizing content creation, that’s still too high for the next 2 billion people.
It may be that content managers like Wordpress require resources that cost $5, but then we’re doing content hosting wrong. If you only pay $1 for gigabytes of podcast downloads in S3, then text content should be less.
I hope not to be turning in an old guy for having to clarify that I’m talking about the web: accessible to all, backwards and forwards compatible as it can be. It’s great that you can post in Twitter, Medium, Snapchat and Facebook for free, but these are just like doing a graffiti in a neighbors wall, you shouldn’t be surprised if your content disappears. It’s your graffiti, but it’s their wall.
I’ll keep looking for a solution before breaking down and paying the $5, but something doesn’t add to me.
And parenthood has taught me that I don’t have time to be maintaining servers.↩︎