reduce or eliminate hosting costs

[Smallmelo]

Through dreamhost, we currently pay:

$10/year for each of the following:
-abqvotes.org
-code4abq.org
-codeforalbuquerque.org
-codeforabq.org (mission critical, must keep)
-imagineabq.org (mission critical, must keep)

$119.40/year for unlimited hosting

We need to figure out how to either reduce/eliminate the cost or get an in-kind donation for it.

move to AWS?

[bradweikel]

What are the tech requirements for hosting? CodeForABQ.org is on Wordpress, right? And imagineabq.org is hosted by ImagineThat, right? What about ABQ Votes -- are we currently hosting it and do we want to be hosting it long-term?

Some possibilities:

1. For budget shared hosting, bluehost might have some cheaper options than dreamhost, depending on requirements. May not scale as well long term, though.
2. Moving codeforabq.org out of Wordpress and into GitHub pages might be cool, both because it would be free (except maybe dns fees?) and because it would eliminate leadership bottlenecks on website maintenance and make it easier for others to contribute.
3. OpenShift has a free tier, though we probably couldn't put everything there.
4. AWS is certainly an option, but I worry about the long-term maintenance implications... it has a steeper learning curve than more conventional hosting environments, and erratic documentation. For a volunteer-run group, it feels a bit risky. We could get into a situation where only one person understands our hosting environment and becomes a bottleneck.
5. Maybe Brown Rice (in Taos) would donate hosting, in exchange for a sponsorship badge? They seem to run a tight ship. I worry about other mom-and-pop local hosts, both because of quality control and support limitations, and because that model is definitely dying in the cloud era.
6. Maybe AppCityLife would sponsor hosting on a platform of our choice? I suspect they would, actually... from their perspective, it would be a low cost sponsorship with very positive benefits for them.

[bradweikel]

Update:
I've started cloning the codeforabq website using github pages. See the repo at https://github.com/codeforabq/codeforabq.github.io and the live site at http://codeforabq.github.io/.

I'm going to keep moving it a bit at a time in my downtime. I'm doing it in tiny pieces so I can clean up the markup to make it easier for future contributors.