Before July 2009, I ran all my web-sites, my mail-server, and a bunch of other software on my own servers located at various ISPs (first co-locating own hardware, later using ISP provided hardware).

In July 2009, I had a fast fiber optic Internet connection installed at my house, and moved everything to a server sitting in my attic.

This has worked great and I have been very happy with this setup. It gave me easy and direct access to the server and allowed me to setup things exactly as I liked it. However it also meant that I had to maintain everything myself. Especially keeping up with new operating systems and various software updates was a bit of a chore. And going on vacation far away from the server was always with a bit of nerves.

Now that the 5 year lease on the fiber optic connection is at an end, I re-evaluated the setup and concluded the it no longer makes sense to run things myself. Cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft can provide everything I need at less than half the cost of the fiber optic connection. And they take care of updating the operation systems and everything else.

I decided on a combination of Microsoft services - Azure for web hosting, Exchange Online for e-mail, and a couple of small Azure virtual servers on each side of the planet for running our Simple DNS Plus servers.

I still have the fiber optic connection at my house - but it has been downgraded to a $25/mo consumer option - perfect for remoting into Azure - and for watching NetFlix :-)