Tightening Up My E-Wallet

Really, Justin?  That’s the best title you can think of?

Anyway, sorry I haven’t updated in a while.  I may have been neglecting this site, but I certainly haven’t been neglecting my duties as a cheapskate.  While I have long-term plans to get rid of my cable television (something that would have been unthinkable to me even a year ago) and downgrade my gym membership, I’m currently downsizing my web presence and thusly saving myself a couple of bucks.  A year ago, I owned three domain names; rebel-alliance.net (which I’ve had forever), waxeater.com, and fighterhayabusa.com (for my old band).  The band is long dead, so when it came time to renew that one, I just let it go.  I haven’t done anything important with rebel-alliance.net in some time, so once that name expires, I’m going to let that one go as well.  Between those two domains, I’m saving myself about $16 a year.  Granted, that’s not a lot of money, but it’s money.  Next is waxeater.com, which I intend to keep and renew, but I took a serious look at the hosting package I was using to keep it up.  I’ve been hosting my domains with a company called HostMagix (at ~$55 a year) for a while, and everything had been great for years, but their support department (along with their sales department) has most likely fallen off the face of the Earth, because they haven’t answered a single e-mail for over a month.  So I began looking at similar web hosting packages that would most likely cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 a month.  But then I began to wonder; do I even really need a hosting package?  Outside of the occasional MP3, do I ever post anything besides text?  Can’t I just do that using a free blogging platform such as Wordress, Blogger, or Tumblr?  I compared the three sites and found that both Blogger and Tumblr will allow you to use your own domain name to point to your blog for free, while WordPress charges $10 a year.  Again, that’s not much, but it’s something.

As of now, I’ve got waxeater.com pointing to my new Tumblr account.  Tumblr ended up winning out against Blogger due to its much simpler and cleaner interface, though that can change any day.  And if neither really do it for me, I can always cough up the $10 a month for WordPress, which I have some experience with (this site is hosted by WordPress).

So between dropping two domains and moving the third to a free blogging platform that also offers free domain services, I’m saving $16 a year on domains and $55 a year on hosting.  Total yearly savings: $71

Not bad.