Why do I create free services (at least free for now)?

Because one of my biggest dreams is to create a service which will be used by many many people.

A man can dream, right?

😞

That is quite noble of you!
*Gives a beer*
I like what you did so far :)

Devrant is such a service

@JoshBent Yup! Not the creator of course but I love it.

I like the way you think.

Foss is the way to go.

There are free services to create a free service, but if it grows, you will need ads to maintain it unfortunately(take a look at wikipedia rn)

Join Facebook, you'll be working on a FREE service that is used by billions :3

What are the services you're talking about?

Try to look at the premium services, then recreate them with some twists

Quite literally the thing that got me started programming.

Find something that you personally would find useful. If it doesn't exist yet, you found your niche!

That's how you get a lot of people to use your service without even trying.

I have the same dream! When I started programming it was making free scripts for games and when I saw hundreds of people using my scripts it just felt awesome.

In order to create a very big free platform, you'll need sponsors. Sad, but true, because if lots of people use the service, you'll need scaling, and it costs money, so unless you are willing to go bankrupt, or sell adds (which knowing you, I don't think is the case), you will need some kind of sponsor.

It's my aim as well. It feels so good when someone uses what you built 😊

I did this more or less by accident when creating a discord bot for fun. Now it shares servers/groups with 14 million discord users.

@Frederikam Most of the awesome stuff out there is created by accident.

@electronix "That's a mean thing to say to Greg... On top of that, he's not even that good looking."

@aritzh I've got about 25 servers myself so that'll be alright, not too expensive and they work!

@tinybyte https://lynkz.me and https://ip-thingy.com :)

@jonhyfun I'd rather cut my balls off than adding tracking ads!

@linuxxx and how is your electric bill? I mean, unless they are hosted in s Raspberry Pi, 25 servers, must cost a considerable amount of money to mantain. And I do agree with you on avoiding ads, but I think that when you have gone to such scale, you should find some source of money, even if it is through voluntary donations, at least to alleviate the costs.

@aritzh They're not hosted at home! Although I run several servers at home, my network is too slow. Not slow for general usage (5 up/50 down) but if I'd get one ddos or a lot of users, I'd be fucked.

I rent two dedi's (with a total of about 20-25 vps's on them) and five vps's :)

@linuxxx and all thay for just your personal projects, with no revenue from any of them? You must be the god of generosity 😄

@aritzh The thing is, I love creating stuff and I have struggled a lot with services imposing restrictions when I did not have any money to spend.

Some people question my motives but hey, it's a hobby, I've got my reasons and for as far as costs go right now, I can manage it.

Next to that, it's my hobby! I love doing what I do every day at work and in my free time.

I've got a costly hobby, yes. But I love it and as for now, I can afford it.

@aritzh Also, for every penny I'd get, I'd have keep administration and so on, I fucking hate that so fuck it for now. If I really can't handle it anymore, I'll have to make some money off of it and I actually hope I can make money off of things I make at some point but for now, this is how I can and want to do it :)

@linuxxx well, I am happy to see you love so much what you do, and although I do not know any of your services apart from your blog, I have to thank you in the name of everyone ;)

So how do you pay for the infrastructure needed to scale up?

@DuckyMcDuckFace
Magic.

@DuckyMcDuckFace I've got enough server power to handle a huge amount of users while my services are hardly being used so I'll be fine :)

@aritzh Other ones: lynkz.me and ip-thingy.com :)

@linuxxx specs of the server power?

@JoshBent My servers: (dedi's and vps's)

4x 6gb ram, 500gb hdd, 4-8 cores, 100mbps unmetered

1x 14gb ram, 1tb hdd, 4-8 cores, 100mbps unmetered

1x 32gb ram, 1tb hdd(dedi), forgot the cores, 1gbit unmetered.

1x 16gb ram, 4tb hdd, forgot the cores as well, 1gbit unmetered.

All dedi's are used as virtualization servers.

@linuxxx sounds a lot like hetzner or the like shopping whenever they destock servers? or is it just a coincidence 😄

@JoshBent Contabo, servdiscount and oneprovider :) cheap doesn't mean bad!

@linuxxx the last server you listed, who is it hosted with and what are you paying for it?

@JoshBent OneProvider. 25 euro a month :) (location France)

Thanks man! That's the spirit to improve the world.