I renewed my hosting account a few weeks ago.  I'm with WebHost4Life.  They are a three nines host.  Three nines means 99.9% uptime as opposed to a five nines (99.999%) uptime.  Three nines is good enough for me and about all I can afford.  Every year at this time I try to think of a way to get more for less with the ideal being something for nothing.  This year I went so far as to poke around for free hosts.  I was surprised to find several.  One called heliohost goes so far as to offer ASP.Net hosting via Mono.  Free is free so I signed up, but literally as I was logging into the new account for the first time the site died and was gone for a couple of weeks.  Weird.  I found another one called 000webhost that offers PHP with MySQL.  The site appears to be professional and well maintained.  In their information they say their cost are offset by donations and other for-fee services.  I've got another unused domain name that I bought when I thought I was going to write the successor to Twitter.  (Don't act like you haven't had the same thought yourself.)  I could set up a WordPress based blog their that I could neglect just like this one, but figure the height of neglect is to not bother setting it up.  If something is worth neglecting, then it's worth neglecting completely. 

Another area of recurring costs (or at least potentially recurring costs) is HappyFish.  In December I will have put in four years on my little pet project.  I'm guessing I've spent upwards of 1500 hours of work on it either coding, debugging, rewriting, or learning.  As I think I've mentioned before, I've gotten much more out of it than it cost me.  The only thing I've learned from working on HappyFish that I have not repeatedly used in my ASP.Net work is multithreading, and I even used that once to handle a long-running action in a web app.  Up to this point all the costs have been modest - annual hosting fees, domain renewals, and my time. 

In my MVC post I explained the new data synchronization features I want to add to HappyFish.  Several choices of data stores are available.  SQL Server, Microsoft's SQL Data Services (formerly SQL Server Data Services), and Amazon's Simple DB are the ones I've investigated so far.  The problem is that they all cost money.  I can of course charge fees for the service or offset costs with advertising, but neither of those options seems too appealing.  Once you start charging for something you have a responsibility to deliver a certain level of service - those nines I mentioned earlier.  Plus you've got to manage all those accounts and billing and all that comes with it.  Still, after learning a few new tricks at DevConnections I thought I could at least pull it all off without the hassle of charging for the accounts on a limited introductory basis to test the waters.  Synchronization Services with SQL Server via a WCF SOA layer appears to offer what I'm looking for.  But after beating my head against the wall, or perhaps ceiling of my shared hosting plan, it looks like it cannot be done.  What I want to do costs more money (read: dedicated server).  So at this point I'm stuck.  If anyone has a racked server with Windows 2003 and SQL Server installed just laying around let me know.