Thanks for all the kind words everyone
Scamp wrote:$50/mo is a lot for a free personal project, certainly more than server costs. I'm just saying it's surprising, usually these sorts of projects are a labor of love anyway.
You have to take into consideration that i have worked on this project for 2 years and the first 9 months i was unemployed and spent 8+ hours on the project every day. When friends were asking me to come online, clear some instances etc i usually declined since i felt that i should spend the time working on the project instead. This continued even after i got a real job and also applied to real life stuffs like being away from home too long when visiting family or not socialising enough with my friends.
After i got my job i spent less time on the project but i always felt that i needed to get work done for the project to get anywhere. You see i am 26 years old and i have always had the dreams that i would create something great that i could base a business around. Even though i like my current real job, making realmplayers like a real job was a goal for me. Maybe i was naive thinking it could ever be like that, but i had some plans to make premium services that could potentially make me get paid enough to quit my real life job. I got offered to get paid by feenix to continue develop the site some months ago(possibly making it more biased towards feenix servers, dunno what really was the agenda, we did not get that far), but i felt that if i wanted to work on the website like a real job i would want the private server community as a whole to pay for it so it would stay independent and unbiased. So it is not only about money, also i definitely like being my own boss.
Anyways, realmplayers started as a fun project and it felt great to provide the service for people. But lately the amount of maintenance and the way the code got developed made it just really boring to work with. The only 2 reasons i did not stop a year ago was thinking the potential of it becoming something more and not wanting to disappoint people.
Sure it is great experience and fun working on free projects, but most of the time when people do free projects they want it to lead to something else. Either as something to mention on their CV or it is most of the times something minor that they can finish up and move on in their life. The problem with realmplayers was that it was definitely not some minor project that i could just stop developing and say "its complete" its definitely far from complete. And it is not something that will change too much in my CV. The project does not fit what i want to work with too well, not the correct programming language(C# for server, i much prefer C++) and not the correct area(i dont really like webdevelopment). This was the first website project(other than back in school) i ever made and it is far from something impressing technical wise(when im looking at it, i might be too hard on myself though, i dunno), i feel like i have failed hard in some areas. On top of that it is for private servers which can be seen as unethical/illegal.
In the future i will most likely be either doing small minor projects that i know can be finished in a reasonable time. Or i will be focusing on doing the kind of development i love, making graphic engines, games or embedded programming.
Maybe linking to some projects i did before back in 2010/2011 will make it easier to understand where my passion really lies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o9oNXOPkGEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IpwpWUuO1Uhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgiRPitLp3ABut who knows what will happen in the future, at the moment i am just being happy feeling i am able to play some diablo3 with friends without feeling like im "wasting time". Maybe il start play some wow on Nostalrius aswell one day, pick up where i left off, definitely more casual though
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Scamp wrote:Go to kimsufi, check out the prices for dedicated servers. The $20/mo package is more than enough to run a server like realmplayers. I was serious when I said I'd take the reins, I'll host it for free if he needs new hosting.
The server is currently running with Windows 2008 R2 server with 32GB ram(most of the time only uses up to 16GB though, but it increases as more and more data is in the database) and 4 cpu cores, the server is hosted by myself which made it easy to have control of everything and easily update things and transfer data for debugging. Realmplayers currently dont need new hosting, but if you are serious i may take you up on that offer some day in the future. Also the forum is running on ubuntu, same hardware but uses only 1GB~ ram and 1 cpu core, the server is an ESXi machine running multiple OSes.
