I don't think so. If we went with AWS and reserved a 2 CPU 1 GB RAM webserver and a 2 CPU 1 GB RAM database for 3 years, it would be $327. That breaks down to $9 a month. We might use some S3 storage as well for archived material, but that would be very low cost. Add a little for DNS service and maybe $11 a month. I'm not sure how that compares to current hosting cost. That won't provide failover if an Amazon data center goes down, but that seems pretty livable.

We could also just host the database on the webserver machine and cut costs even more, but that using the AWS database service means they manage the DB and backups and such which is nice.

I try to avoid Amazon in general, but what kind of options are there?

You mean other hosting options? Digital Ocean is a good option, probably similar in price but without the managed database (unless they've added that). There's also Azure, but I don't know what their pricing is. Probably not too different. Google has cloud services as well.

Pretty much everyone uses Amazon Web Services every day even if they aren't aware of it.

Yeah, that's what I mean -- is there any avoiding it? If the answer is no, that's fine.

Digital Ocean does have managed databases now. Looks like it would be about $20 a month for webserver and database.

Vultr doesn't have a managed database, but an instance big enough for both webserver and database might be possible at $10/mo.

Azure doesn't look practical for small deployments.

Thank you for all of this, Gud. Let us know if we can donate via Jesse to help.

We pay like $35/month now, I think, so whatever!