Switching to cheaper hosting and stopping indexing wikipedia to cut costs

Priorities for 2022

As detailed in the searchmysite.net retrospective and future plans, one of the priorities for 2022 was moving to a cheaper hosting provider (another was to spend less time writing blog entries, hence this being a brief post).

Cheaper hosting

I had hoped to use fosshost.org, but unfortunately they’re not taking new projects. Of the paid alternatives, I chose hetzner.com which appeared around a quarter of the cost of the previous hosting and got reasonable mentions in places like Hacker News.

Stopping indexing wikipedia

Given I need a minimum of 4Gb RAM (ideally 8Gb) and 250Gb disk if continuing to index wikipedia the options were still pretty expensive, e.g. EUR27.25 monthly for the CPX41. However, if I stopped indexing wikipedia, I could get away with 80Gb disk, in which case the CPX21 for EUR8.28 monthly would be fine. So I have removed the wikipedia content. It can be readded later if there is renewed interest, matched by sufficient paid search as a service subscriptions.