Week 5 A Peek Into Hosting and Freelancing

This is week 5 after being laid off.

It has been a wild ride. Two major things happened. First, I am finally charging people for the first time in my life, which is not through a salary. Second, I sent out my first ever freelancing proposal to a potential client. Both are things I've never done before.

Last week I mentioned that I found some cheap servers to host my WordPress sites, and I actually invited a couple of my friends to move over. Initially, I was planning to do it for free, but on second thought, I'm out of a job in providing services that my friends were already actually paying for. I should charge something to make this sustainable. The goal is actually not to earn money, but to not get to the point where I'm paying to keep everyone's sites up. These servers are not like Google or Amazon that are so famous, so they might go out of business, and we need a budget to move sites if that happens.

The cool thing was, we noticed that there was a significant performance increase compared to their previous, more expensive servers. Less costs and better performance. What a dream. Even better, we offer Chinese support, which is unique since most WordPress hosting companies primarily provide English support only. Especially the ones that you see on the blogs that you search on Google, because they're mostly affiliate links from WordPress hosting companies outside of Taiwan.

Also thinking psychologically, it is healthier to start with a small fee than to offer something for free and then suddenly start charging later due to the need to move to other servers which aren't as cheap. Definitely better for the long term. This is currently an invite-only hosting because I'm charging too little for it to be a sustainable business. It's more like helping friends. So feel free to connect with me on Instagram, and if we become friends, maybe I'll reach out for an invite.

The second big thing that happened was a friend asked if I could help develop a system for her school. She asked a couple of times, but since I didn't have time back then, I rejected each time. Now that I'm without a job, I have time, so I agreed to try it out. I've never been a freelancer before. I've always been an employee, even when working part-time for coding bootcamps. That's still the employee mindset, although you're doing a contractor thing. Freelancing is completely new territory, and I'm realizing how hard it actually is.

My friend initially reached out to other developers, but found the price a bit too much, and I also agreed. After asking around my freelancing friends, it was actually a really affordable price. This is because I forgot to calculate all the communication costs. Building for a client is different from building for myself. The challenge isn't just coding itself, it's the communication. I can't just dive into someone's mind and understand their thoughts. And maybe sometimes they don't understand their own thoughts.

Anyways, I sent out my first proposal to her this week, and we'll see how it goes. To be honest, I'm also very eager to support what she is doing, so making money may not be my first priority. We'll share more about this in the future weeks.

Oh, and one last thing is that I'm going to Japan next week. Since I'll be traveling, I probably won't be updating this diary next week, so I'll see you all in week 7.

This is me, week 5 after the layoff, signing off.