07/18 @ 05:55am
07/07 @ 09:05pm
"Installing Human Interface Device (HID-compliant mouse). Click here for details."
Really?
“What?!” I hear you crying as you frantically reread the title, “that’s outrageous! You’re a drunkard and a fool!”
But, I assure you, I am no fool. Working for free can actually help you as a freelancer to earn more money. The concept is actually very simple, and it’s value is often overlooked.
Now, before the flame war begins, I’m not talking about jumping all over creation looking for charity work to boost your karma and win the lottery (although, that might work as well). The idea is based on two things:
Working for free can expand your list of business contacts, resources, and potential clients.
The first is business networking. You can never have too many contacts. In my own experience, it seems that business owners always have a few friends in need of a Web Developer. Those friends have friends who have friends, and so on and so forth.
“So what?” you’re thinking to yourself, “I can do that and get paid for it!”
Yes, you can. The problem is, you can only do that for those people who can afford to pay your pretty little salary. Those people tend to have things like business plans, associates, bosses, consultants, lots of red tape, and a little black book of people to call when you screw up.
Then there’s the group of people who can’t necessarily afford you. You’re looking at the little guys — the Mom & Pop pizza shop, the just-out-of-school art student, the hair stylist trying to get her business of the ground — who might not have the few thousand dollars to shell out for a nice website. You have a serious advantage here: they don’t have many people clamoring to do their website pro bono, which makes you their go-to guy for both their business, and their friends. You could have quite a bit of paid work coming your way.
Important Note It is important to express to the person you are providing your free services to that you do not normally work for free, so that they don’t go telling everyone and their brother that there’s a free web designer in town.
Second, and most important to me is skill development and portfolio expansion. Admit it: despite your all-powerful knowledge of the web development process, there are just some things you never got around to learning. What was it for you? Flash? Drupal? E-commerce management?
For many projects, learning-by-the-seat-of-your-pants simply isn’t an option. So what happens when your client asks you to do something you don’t know how to do? There are generally a few avenues you can take:
- “I don’t know how to do that, maybe there’s an alternative.”
This can go in a multitude of directions. Some clients think it’s good that you think outside the box. Some don’t like that things aren’t going according to plan. Others have no input at all (my least favorite) and you have to think of a way to give them what they want.
- “I don’t know how to do that, I’m going to need to bring on another person to help me.”
This might not go over so well, especially if your client is on a tight budget. Bringing on another person might sound pricey, and it carries the added risk of making you seem incompetent when you tell them you can’t add this feature or that imagery. Control freaks and micromanagers will find this especially annoying — now they have yet another person to manage and talk to (even if they don’t, it still carries an “added work” connotation).
- “I don’t know how to do that, but I’ll give it a shot”
It might sound ambitious to your boss but, in many cases, doesn’t bode well for the resulting product. You spend a week or two… or three… trying to learn it, and it may or may not work by the time your deadline approaches. You might botch the project and upset your customer, and have to go with option one or two anyway. Depending on the severity of your failure, you may even lose a customer. Bad for business, methinks.
If you’re working for free, however, there’s much less pressure to make it perfect. If you’re working with one of the “little guys” I mentioned above, they probably won’t have much of an issue with you taking a little longer to learn something a little better and do it right. In fact, they’ll probably encourage it. By the time you’re done with your project, you’ve learned something new. Something that you can take back to your bigwig clients and use to really melt their old, leathery rich-guy faces. I do free projects all the time to simply expand my knowledge of the new technologies out there: new languages, frameworks, strategies, and even hosting providers (see my post on VPS Providers).
So what do you think? Is working for free worth it? Have you done it before? Leave it in the comments.
Read MoreWell, it’s been a long trip.
Finding a VPS provider is one thing, but finding one that you can afford even on a college student’s budget is a horse of a different color. It may have taken forever, but I think I’ve found the Holy Grail of VPS hosting: my new host, VPSFarm. I don’t mean to gush, but I’m truly impressed by their VPS offerings, and I’m really hoping that I don’t anger the Gods of Uptime by writing all about them.
Background
Now, there are a few things you should understand about my hunt for the perfect VPS before I explain why I went with VPSFarm as my final provider:
First, I am a control freak when it comes to my servers. I want to have as much fine-grained control over them as I possibly can. Being a programmer, developer, and general all-around-hackity enthusiast, I’m constantly tweaking things — opening things up, changing settings, running benchmarks, tuning, and prodding; not only am I doing this with packaged software, or source code that I compile myself within the Operating System, but I’m doing it at the kernel level, too. This pretty much immediately ruled out anything that utilized kernel sharing. Goodbye, OpenVZ.
Second, I’m a DIY kinda guy. While some people find it convenient to simply let their host load up a new image onto their VPS node, I’m not really into that. I don’t like the fact that I could accidentally push a button, or an intern at the host could type something wrong, and my node and all of it’s data could be blown away. That sounds bad to me. I’m also really into customizing the installation that my VPS will run on. I don’t like fluff. I’m the kind of administrator that prefers a very minimal installation: a functioning operating system, and a package manager. Not only that, but I need console access to the box. I need to see it boot up. I need the lowest-level interaction I can possibly get.
Unsurprisingly, there are very few VPS providers that offer this kind of control. This criteria essentially led me down a very narrow path: I’m looking for a VPS that is virtualized all the way down to the hardware. I’m looking for a Xen HVM provider, on a piss-poor college student’s budget.
Finally, power is important to me. If I’m going to buy resources on a server somewhere in a remote datacenter to do my computing and spend my time setting it up for my needs, I’m not going to buy a wimpy low-end box. I’m going to buy in bulk. I’m going to buy enough for my needs. And then a lot more. I’m talking a fast CPU, a boatload of RAM, and some serious network performance, including low ping, high throughput, and miniscule downtime.
Oh boy, now I’ve really gotten myself into a pickle. Let’s recap my search criteria:
I’m looking for a hardware-virtualized, roll-your-own server with console-level KVM access with a quick CPU, as much RAM as I can get, and premium bandwidth. Oh, right, and it’s gotta be really cheap.
And so, the search begins…
My first instinct was to go lurking about the Web Hosting Talk forums. For days, I scoured the VPS Hosting Offers and read what seemed like an endless stream of mixed reviews about a plethora of hosts in their oh-so-helpful VPS Hosting forums.
My first guinea pig that match my rigorous specifications was ThrustVPS. Now, the company profile was good (the owner, Rus Foster, is rather notorious for his hosting ventures). The reviews were good, the price was certainly right, and they have a pretty-damn-close datacenter to where I am (Clifton, NJ), so my pings were sure to be nice and low. For the first few months, everything went reasonably well. I can’t really badmouth ThrustVPS. As far as bang-for-the-buck value, they simply can’t be beat. What really got to me was their ridiculous downtime. It seemed alright at first — once in a blue moon, my VPS would reboot. I barely noticed. After awhile, my node would fall off the face of the earth. Sometimes it would disappear from my SolusVM panel. Sometimes my IP would change without my knowledge. I even had it wiped without warning (see my concerns about that above). This got to be a little too much hassle, even for the tiny pricetag. So, I decided that “this is not the droid I’m looking for“, and proceeded to shop around a bit more.
My first instinct was to simply pay a little more for a little less. I looked into the big guys: MediaTemple, Linode, Slicehost, VPS.NET. They really need no introduction. They were all, of course, amazing for what they were: if you need a reasonably powerful VPS with a control panel, they’re you’re go-to guys. You’re going to pay a premium though, which means — as I said before — paying a little more for a little less. I tried all of them. All of them were absolutely awesome, and I loved them. It was hard to love the pricetag though, especially considering that I wasn’t getting some of the bigger features I was looking for: console access and custom installations. So, I kept my eyes open for something a little closer to my specs.
“A diamond in the rough.”
Then I stumbled across VPSFarm. They’re a small company, hosting their services in Ashburn, VA — only an 8ms ping away from me. I was a bit wary of their pricing model at first: they charge on a per-hour basis based on the specs of the VPS. Their prices range from $0.03-$0.12/hour, which is equivalent to approximately $21-$86/month — should you choose to keep the VPS that long. Basically, you load up your account with a minimum of $10.00 via PayPal in their customer area (from their Twitter, they will have more methods soon), and they ding your account a few cents every hour or so.
This is what is truly intriguing about this model, especially for a developer: should I all-of-a-sudden need some wicked horsepower — say, to crunch a lot of numbers — I can fire one up, and not pay a hefty $86. I may only need one for a few hours to get my work done, and then I can delete it. If that isn’t good enough, VPSFarm also allows it’s customers to set their own hourly rate, but with the added risk of having the node removed without warning. So, even better, I can ‘rent’ one of those beastly VPSs, with 8GB of RAM and all of the trimmings, for the wallet-friendly price of $0.01/hour. Pretty cool, hm?
Even if I’m not doing that, their monthly prices are reasonable, especially for the specs that they offer. There is a price comparison on their home page, showing their price-per-megabyte for RAM in contrast to their competitors.
They absolutely meet my specs, especially when it comes to console access: their entire service is controlled by logging into a Java Applet provided on their site, aptly-named the Console, where you have a command-line interface to create, modify, and delete your nodes, among other account controls.
The VPSFarm Console area, where you can control your VPS as if you were sitting at the keyboard in front of it.
Let’s be clear: they are all about no frills. Their customer area is simple, showing your account balance, a list of your active nodes, and a quick bandwidth usage overview for your VPSs. To be honest, I absolutely love it. It’s very clean and simple, and reinforces the “if you can’t use it, you don’t need a VPS” mantra. When you want to interact with your VPS, you either SSH into your booted-up box or, if you need more ‘at the keyboard’ control, VNC into their Console area.
So you have the hardware specs. What about network performance? Well, I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty, but being that I’ve got a 100Mbit connection to my house, it was pretty easy to test. My ping to the server is approximately 8ms, with almost no jitter. I get about 9MB/s both up and downstream to the server. And before you ask: no, it doesn’t go down. I have Pingdom reporting 100% uptime for the two months that I’ve had the box, and it’s going strong. Not a single reboot nor a network outage in sight. Extremely impressive for such a seemingly small company.
My favorite part of this whole adventure and writing about it is that I have absolutely no experience dealing with their support team. With Thrust, I was contacting them constantly: “my server is down”, “I’m getting horrible lag”, “you overbilled me… again“. I was always getting back half-English responses telling me it was my fault. That I somehow caused my billing cycle to repeat itself.
For now, I am happy to report that I have not had a single problem with my VPSFarm service since I signed up, and I’ll be posting my uptime counter on this site in the near future for you naysayers out there.
I will be giving my newfound friends at VPSFarm my 5/5-star seal of approval. Good job, VPSFarm. Keep up the good work.
Have you had any good or bad experiences with VPS or other hosting providers? Leave it in the comments, I’d love to hear about it.
Read More
06/28 @ 12:21am
Monster + Code + Star Wars 1080p marathon = Geek night.
04/14 @ 02:33am
@thrustvps Ticket #YOJ-295437. Please resolve this. I'm getting a little annoyed. Thanks.
02/21 @ 02:59am