The dream of every web entrepreneur is to be able to generate an income that will allow them to one day, quit their day job.
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. -Confucius
In 1996, I published my first website to Geocities. Hard to believe that that’s almost 20 years ago!
I registered my first domain name and started hosting my own website(s) in 2000 after graduating from college. I started off (like most) with shared web hosting but quickly realized the drawbacks of it when I found out I could not customize “my” server which was far from being “my” server. After five years of shared web hosting, I happily upgraded to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) so I could learn web administration in a Linux environment.
I have had as few as one and as many as over 50 domains in my web portfolio over the years as my interests and the market(s) have ebbed and flowed. I have dropped a lot of .ca domains that I registered from the drop list that were costing me money and weren’t worth the effort to sell. The few sites that have survived the purge, are the ones that have always been my hobby sites. This year (2015), my web portfolio has started to grow again, including me re-registering one of the .ca’s I dropped several years ago for a project that I have since barely started but have big plans for.
I have always had the dream of owning a web development company that created jobs for people. To create a web development environment (both work and technology) and a web development team that I could mentor and build my business(es) around. Dreams that I dropped several years ago that I have started to revisit.
Earlier this year, I opened up a web editor for the first time in 3-4 years for more than just a minor code edit. Over the Summer, I worked on creating my sandbox – a virtualized LAMP web environment for PHP development. I documented the whole process so I can easily spin up new development environments. This, along with acknowledging that I do love working on websites, seems to have re-ignited my passion for web development.
My websites in the past have made me about a whopping $100/year from AdCents. I have had a lot of time over the years to think about why I was not as successful as I would have liked to have been the first time around as a web entrepreneur. One realization I had, was that I had to stop looking at my websites as a programmer and start looking at them as a business owner. The other was the need to stop reading and start doing!
The plus side to being a programmer, is that I don’t have to hire someone else to do it! The downside of being a programmer, is that I (can) spend my entire day doing it! I need to spend as little time as possible doing php programming so that I can focus on business development which is not my strength but I do have the expertise for.
It’s time I started pumping air into my own tires.
And with that, I (re-)started this blog with my (re-)ignited passion(s).