ITCOW [L]

And then it went *poof*

It has been in my brain for some time now and the cause of many migraine attacks on me personally and it isn’t worth the risk of my full time job and most importantly, it’s over, well almost I guess.

I’ve closed down my part time business that I maintain on my own time after I knock off from my full time job.

Here, I’ll share what I call the facts on my personal view:

1. Customer service is important but when you’re bloody asking for help, be kind and you’ll receive kindness in return. Using F* words in your request support mail will not speed things up.

2. Anyone can learn Linux, anyone can purchase or build like me 1 or 2 or heck 100 x 1U server, anyone can co located that server in a data center than claim they have a WORLD CLASS environment housing their server with "state of the art network facilities" but please, so can anyone, anyone can start their own hosting business with generally $1000 and a monthly fee of $100 or less depending what OS you run and what features you want to offer and you can call yourself anything from CEO, co founder, Manager whatever since you’re the only one in the business.
3. I did this for almost 2 years earning at good times 2-2.5k a month on this alone (then how the hell you think I own 6 PCs?), time was always not enough.
4. Yah right, if so good why give up? I hear that tons of times from friends and fellow customers that grew close over this period of time. I wanted to concentrate on my full time job and to further my studies. Morever, the pay now is so much better so why suffer? Going to datacenters when servers goes down, playing with high availabilities setup, trying to get that darn kernel re-compile for new hardware added, reading and buying more books, more migraines. Getting screwed all over via e-mail for downtime. And please, you are paying $3 a month, it ain’t even enough for me to smoke for a day! I can say that but not some big company but they do think the same thing or rather, their employee think the same thing, in this world, the words of "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys" is always true. I had enough for a while.
5. I do have some close friends and customers whom I may not have even met before who are nice though but on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the nasty few, who always mail asking simple questions: How do I backup a mySQL database? How do I setup my POP3/ SMTP? What is FTP? Why need propagation when DNS changes for my domain?

Nevertheless, I have learn the ways of running a home business and there’s so many other ways I have pick up of earning extra cash. I have also learn to be a more patience person and that is something they don’t teach in schools. I feel it is important and lucky that I walk away from this unharm although with many threat os law suits etc but please, you think I’ll start a business with no knowledge of the Law? *wink