Introduction
Two days ago some of my fellow Mastodoners started to show how much does it cost to run their blogs?, the answers varies from Hyde spending 57 dollars a month to Roland’s spending 7.3 dollars with Kev’s who spends 32 dollars and Horst spending 13 dollars a month.
And what about this blog?, how much does it cost?
TL;DR
Here it is:
| Item | Monthly price USD |
|---|---|
| Domain | 2.33 |
| VPS | 2.50 |
| CDN | 2.00 |
| Git Server | 2.50 |
| DNS | 1.00 |
| Total | 10.33 |
Domain
I have started this blog a month ago, I have bought a .blog domain my other blog is a niche blog and runs under a .me domain, I wanted to start fresh and because this is going to be a personal blog, not a niche one, I though it would be great to have a .blog tld, the domain cost 28 dollars a year, and I do not use privacy protection on my domains. I registered it on DNSimple as with my other domains.
VPS
I mostly serve all my sites from one VPS on Linode the only other service that has its own server is my Mastodon Instance, so I am assigning just half of the Linode cost to this blog.
CDN
I used to run My own CDN, it that was pricey, but run that setup for almost two years, the I read about BunnyCDN on Kev’s blog, so I switched to it and deleted all distributed VPSs, because my site is static, I can run it completely from the CDN, I used that before on Amazon and Cloudfront, but the hit ratio was really small, at BunnyCDN I get 85% hit ratio on my other blog that has a lot more visitors that this one.
Git Server
As this blog is a static site, generated with Middleman I use a Git server to store it, why not use the same VPS for the Git server?, Well, there is really not a good answer for that, but I will assign only half of the amount to this blog, as I have the other blog also there.
DNS
My DNS server provider is DNSimple, I have all my domains there I pay 5 dollars for it, but I will only assign 1 dollar to this blog, because as I said, all my other domains are also there. There is an extra charge over five domains, but I only have five of my domains using DNS services.
Conclusion
It does not represent a lot of money to run a blog, you can also do it for free if you want, but I like having control over the servers, what I really invest is time, not only on this blog, but on the other site. The other site is about Linux and I have two blogs there, one in English and one in Spanish, it is really easy to run Multple blogs with Middleman, is like having a Wordpress MultiSite.