I've got a bit of time on my hands this winter, and one of the things I
finally have time for is optimizing my cloud hosting expenses.
I hadn't really kept close track on it, but it turns out I was spending in the range of $130-$150/mo in various "cloud hosting" expenses. Most of it was legacy stuff that I simply didn't use much, and a lot of it had been functionally static for a long while, but I was still hosting it on full Linux boxes in the cloud, which aren't the cheapest things to run - especially for static content.
That said, I don't want to just drop the servers offline entirely. The content is still occasionally useful, just... isn't being updated.
So, I've moved the bulk of my content from virtual Linux boxes to Google Cloud Storage, going from $20-$30/mo/server to about $0.25/mo for the lot of it.
If you want to mirror a server, 'wget -mkEpnp
http://www.example.com' is your friend. This will collect all the content/required files, and convert the links for static viewing.
Then, Google Static Hosting:
https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-websiteIf you have little enough content, you can fit in the "Always Free" tier (fairly recent):
https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/always-free-usage-limitsThis gets you a bit of storage, a bit of App Engine, and a micro Linux VM (tiny CPU, 600MB RAM) for free, at least for now.
So, a few afternoons of work, and I'll have reduced my hosting costs from in the ballpark of $150/mo down to about $10/mo, with no actual loss of functionality, and a bit of time savings in the process too. :)