I’ve been using Linode since about 2012, and I cannot recommend them enough. A few months ago, they announced a cheaper $5/month plan. I recently switched to that, and saved a bunch of money. I pay for their backup plan, so the total is $7/month. On their previouls plan, I was paying $25/month. I was worried the downgraded specs would be a problem. Then again, I don’t get much traffic these days. I’ve been running on this downgraded server a couple months ago, and it’s working perfectly fine. A static website doesn’t require that much CPU or memory.

The downside is that you need to do all your own admin yourself. But I find it’s not that hard to setup Apache and some email services. If you’re willing (or wanting) to get your hands a bit dirty, Linode is great. If you want to give them a shot, you can try them out with my referral code: fb7465a0d5bef7335873ccdfc31bb8d3367c1945

It’s actually pretty amazing at how cheap hosting has become. When I first started hosting my own domain back in 2002, I used a colocation service. I supplied the Linux box, and for $100/month, I was ready to go with full root access. At the end of 2003, the hard drive on that machine died, and I moved my hosting to Server Matrix for $60/month. This was a dedicated physical server, but I did not own it. The upside is that if a disk died, I wasn’t responsbile for fixing it. And I still had full root access to install whatever I wanted. I jumped to a few hosting providers around this time, some via acquisition. By 2012, I was paying $70/month on SoftLayer.

But virtual private servers were becoming more popular around this time, and I didn’t need my own physical server. The cheapest Linode plan was only $20/month. So in 2012, I switched to Linode. Adding in $5 for backup, it was $25/month. But that was still way cheaper than SoftLayer. And now, with the new price reduction, I’m down to $7/month. And that’s quick summary of how, in the span of 15 years, my hosting costs have gone from $100/month down to $7/month, all with full root access. And I couldn’t be happier!