Rampidbyter's comments

I left a high paying job two weeks ago mid-project to start a start-up. I did it because each day in that cube I cared less and less about money and more and more about freedom. I spent the better part of the past two years making my company over 7.6 million in just six months, and actually much more over the full two years.

I needed to create and to be rewarded for my efforts fully. Everyone I know was against it, wife, family, and friends. Thought I was throwing away something they could only hope for. At the end of the day we live once I'd rather be poor and happy trying something I always wanted than stay in that cube always wondering.

What prompted my move so abruptly was interviewing a guy for a senior position. We asked him what his ideal job would be, and he gave an answer of doing his own business. He excused it as a dream because he has kids, and that's when I realized everyone I worked with had the same reason for not just doing it. That's when it snapped in me.

Week later I put in my notice. No jobs no nets to fall back onto. I actually worked on my own project last week and it was heaven. I have a meeting for a three month contract next week to feed my funds to continue this dream. Brother this has been the best two weeks of my life.

I did it for my company. Except replace garage with basement. I have a business ISP account with a dedicated staff rep. and 24/7 on-site repair. It costs just at $77 a month for 10/5 with 5 static IPs.

I purchased an older HP Proliant server off eBay with 12 drives for just under $600 shipped for everything. I installed VMWare ESXi on the machine and then created 5 virtual machines. One machine for an email server, one for database server, one for web, and two staging machines for database/web server. Total cost for those machines was zero, and thanks to virtual appliances I can expand.

At that point I have redundant power supplies, raid hard drives, and plenty of backup swaps. I also can configure the server whenever to allocate resources as needed to the machines running. I can quickly copy and create a new server whenever I need one, which is really nifty.

In the end the only down-time I have is when my power is totally out. If I host I usually have about a 97% up-time excluding regular maintenance. The machine running constantly makes less impact than my Dell XPS 720.

Blue Ash, OH http://www.epsilon.com/

Looking for several senior .Net developers for several large projects. So far we've had "senior" devs who can't code, or pass background checks. Don't apply if you don't know what a collection object is or have a criminal background.