Hosting Another Operational Cost

Our battle to lower operating costs continues. Val recently posted on her revelations regarding her cell phone and the lowering our monthly expenses as a consequence. About a month ago I identified another area that we could save money on, our website hosting costs.

Our websites, SailboatFamily.com, BillAndVal.com, BillPeer.me, and a few others are "hosted" (or stored) on computer systems that are part of the Internet. Not only do these systems store and present webpages, but they also serve other functions for us like email. Unfortunately, many of the features we leverage are not part of free systems.

I've kept hosting our various websites at the same company (websitesource) for the past 5 years at a price of $119 per year. For all the features they provided, they were priced very well and totally satisfied our needs. I've never had a service failure reason to cause me to want to look else where. The current years contract is ending in November, and I was tempted to simply renew. However, we want to lower our operating costs as much as possible and Val suggested, even though we were happy with their services, I begin looking for another web hosting company that could fulfill our needs at a lower price.

After about an hour of searching, I found one that was not only cheaper, but one that has fantastic service experienced first hand by me, and that is with a company called GoDaddy (you may have seen their sensuous Danica Patrick TV commercials peddling their services during various sporting events).

This past week I moved all of our websites to GoDaddy's computer systems, and we now pay $72 per year! That is nearly $50! Within 2 years, I will have saved enough to cover another year and some months of hosting. Great great great!

If I take in the hour of searching for the next right hosting company, plus the time I spent moving the websites (about 4 hours), that results in about $10 per hour ($50 / 5 hours). The cool thing is now that same amount ($50) will be recouped next year too, but with no additional hours spent (this years $50 savings + next years $50 in savings), giving a value of $20 per hour. This just keeps going, year after year after year ... $30 per hour, $40 per hour, and so on as the net effect of investing the time. Plus, the time is already spent.

Even if you are happy with service you are being provided, you should still check around to find lower costing alternatives. You may find, as I did, something that satisfies your needs equally well as before, but cost your family less money.