Do I Really Need Web Hosting?

I’ve paid for web hosting for more than ten years now. All this time I’ve been a loyal PowerSurge customer and they have indulged my every whim, adding more space for free, setting up Subversion servers and helping me troubleshoot SSH access. Their support is top notch. I believe I’ve paid 15 US dollars every month for their services, which is a fair price.

Lately I’ve wondered if I really need traditional web hosting at all these days. For a few months now I’ve handled all my email with Google Apps¹ and I host two out of three websites on GitHub². Both solutions are—or can be—free and they work very well. In fact, they work so well that I see no advantage in using conventional web hosting at all. Not for a person like me, with rather modest needs.

I suspect I will hold on to my PowerSurge account for a little longer, mostly out of fear. It feels weird to abandon something that has worked so well for so many years. However, I could really use those 15 dollars better, perhaps for a paid GitHub account. I really am in love with GitHub, which is a strange thing, since I rarely write a line of code.