When pandemic hit in 2020 I found myself out of work. Until then I used to have a java based pirate gameserver of a MMORPG as a hobby.

When pandemic hit I noticed that online players count increased from like 70 to 200 without much advertising because purely of people being stuck in home. So i decided to scale and spent 2 years with that. What a wild ride it was.

So i invested a bit in ads, managed to reach around 500 online players, opened my own company and launched a couple other successful spinoffs of that gameserver.

First year it was a goldmine but I was doing 10-14 hour days because I had to take care of everything (web, advertising, payment integrations, player support and also developing the server itself, ddos protections and etc.). I made quite a bit of money, saved for a downpayment for mortgage and got an apartment.

Second year I noticed that there was a lot of competition and online players count dropped, but I double downed on this and invested a lot into the product itself and spent most of the time developing a perfect gameserver that would be the big bang while also maintaining existing ones. Clasic overengineering mistake. As you can guess, I crashed and burned on all levels, never even managed to launch my final project because simply the scope was too big and I had trouble finding decent devs to outsource it to, since it was a very niche gameserver.

In the end I learned a lot especially about my own limits and ownership, now Im back to being a dev but working as a contractor.

I believe having actual business owner experience allows me to have different perspective and I can bring more to the table rather than focusing on crunching tasks.

Ok Google

I'm going to make 4 statements of which only 3 are true. You tell me in the comments which 3 are true.

1. At my job in the marketing department, I manage our Facebook ads campaign where we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising.

2. MIS department inexplicably blocked the marketing dept from the Facebook domain altogether near the end of the day.

3. They also block Dropbox although we still have to manage all the distribution of digital video and commercials to our tv advertisers.

4. I work in a technically progressive environment that understands how things work online.

Online ads....

I think the problem is that in the age of "AI" and "machine learning" etc etc - the reality is that targeted or personalised advertising is absolutely shite.

All I see when I browse around are ads for things that I bought. It's like - I FUCKING BOUGHT THIS WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO SELL IT TO ME??!

I think anyone worried about the machine uprising enslaving humanity can relax and not worry about it, at least until amazon can understand when it has sold you something or you just looked at something.

Pulled this from a web site's privacy policy. Remember, just because there's a switch doesn't mean anyone has to abide to that rule.

Browser “Do Not Track” Signals:  Most browsers contain a “do-not-track” setting.  In general, when a “do-not-track” setting is active, the user’s browser notifies other websites that the user does not want their personal information and online behavior to be tracked and used, for example, for behavioral advertising.  As required by recent Shine the Light law amendments we are required to inform you that, as is the case with most websites, we do not honor or alter our behavior when a user to one of our Websites has activated the “do-not-track” setting on his/her browser.

Sorry for my bad english.

So, I made an e-commerce site for a company once. It's actually just a WordPress site with that WooCommerce plugin.

After that, my dad was "advertising me (suggesting me?)" to one of his friend that I can make a website.

Then his friend called me and I asked what to do. In short, she has an online marketplace website where the users can be either a seller or a buyer (just an ordinary e-bay like site). Her site is built with PHP (codeigniter 2).

I can't make custom site that's why I'm using WordPress for my client, I'm still learning PHP right now. How do I tell my dad to not "overestimate" my ability to make sites. I already told my dad about my abilities and I'm still learning, but he keep saying that I should accept it because it will give you experiences.

-- Have you ever self hosted a Linux/Free Bsd server at home?
-- What was the maintenance like in terms of operation and cost compared to an online service?

I and my partner are planning to self host our Ubuntu server locally because currently though we spend less than $1100 a month on Azure with moderate CPU usage but we plan to scale out with believes that the server cost might sky-rocket.

We made a budget of $25k for the setup which includes cost of hardware, bandwidth and power.

We also made some research concerning most used hardwares for home servers because we really are newbees talk of hardware. What we found are options related to the Intel Xeon as CPU, some others say use NAS, while some are more of advertising.

$25k on the desk,
we care more about speed than of space. How can we make the setup totally worth it? You don't have to spare us a change, just some headlight and way to go.
Your advice are needed. Thank you.