Recently I was - once again - annoyed by the whole administration whatever that comes along with your own VPS. I was for a long time some kind of a self hosted guy, doing almost everything myself, including email, calendar&contacts, files, irc, git repositories, minecraft and so on and so forth. Although I like the freedom again and again I am annoyed by small stuff that either requires too much attention or does not work as you would expect it to. Examples for that are:

1. Spam filtering on my self hosted email is just not as good as it should be
2. Contacts/Calendar using baikal are not as stable as I would expect
3. My server requires constant security updates
4. There is always so much configuration to be done when pushing an app
5. continue with your own experience…

So there is loads of annoying stuff around to think about other options. So I thought when I shut down my linode VPS (which is, I admit it, not the cheapest option around) for 25$, what can I get instead:

1. Google Apps for Business (5$/month) will give me mail, contacts, calendar, online storage and much more with 30GB included, a perfect opportunity to get rid of some extra services, in this case dropbox.
2. Some minecraft server, there is a lot of solid offers around for around 5$/month
3. Replacing my sftp upload using dropshare with amazon s3 storage, should be pretty cheap (no idea how much, yet though)
4. Switching my IRC stuff to IRCCloud (5$/month)
5. Using github for my git stuff (I am a student, so I have 5 free repositories, which is fine for me)
6. Using AWS S3/CFN to host my already jekyll generated webpage using SSL.
7. For most of the apps I am running a free heroku account is more than enough.
8. My clients who were still hosted on my server mostly agreed to switch either to a standard webhosting thing or a PaaS solution which leaves me with much less setup and administration stuff.

So if not everything goes wrong I still have some money left to add 1-2 more services and eventually get a cheap hourly or monthly VPS.

But this only becomes a really good deal considering how much less time I am spending now maintaining all this crap! I can just run and deploy stuff, it is really lovely.