all projects on mocacinno.com will stop working soon

[mocacinno]

Just a quick reference thread where i can link to from all my sideprojects.

I've been running a dedicated (bare metal) server hosted in a datacenter in the netherlands for many, many years... Due to some health conditions i can work a little less, combined with the exploding cost of living and the fact that my dedicated hosting provider just announced a price-rise of about €20/month, i started calculating that my hobby costs me about $2000/year. I have some ads for hardware wallets here and there, but in a (very) good year i still make less than $100 from those ads (that's inlcuding every add on every tool and every donation address i ever made).

Bottom line is that i need to cut back, i have to get rid of my dedicated server and more than half of my domain names. I'm going to replace my dedicated box by either a shared hosting plan or a cheap VPS, but what is certain is that i won't be able to run full nodes anymore, nor will i be able to run .net applications or golang (echo) servers i had written myself to power mocacinno.com.

Over the years, i have built tons of services all running on my dedicated server... Including but not limited to my bitcoin tools, my testnet faucet, the scammers bingo, a bitcoin price indicator, an ad management tool, a btcpayserver,... Over the next couple of days/weeks i will be turning off OR MIGRATING those tools one by one. I'll look at whether i can still run them in my future (cheap) environment, whether or not they're still safe to run and whether or not they had sufficient users and then decide if it's worth (or even possible) to let (part of) the service exist.... But i can pretty much say that at least 3/4th of those tools will seize to exist in their current form

Just FYI, this is not a begging thread... I can still feed my family and keep the lights on in my home... I won't be gone from the bitcoin ecosystem... It's just that the ~€150/month spent on hosting and domain names is currently better spent elsewhere. This thread of more of a reference i can post a link to on every tool i want to turn off in the coming days/weeks, so i don't have to explain myself yet again.

List of services gone/replaced with date (DD/MM/YYYY)

• my lightning node, this will not be replaced but i'll use electrum to send/receive lightning payments from this moment foreward (01/02/2023)
• my btcpayserver, this will not be replaced... The people who use this server have been contacted per PM/mail and replied. (01/02/2023)
• my full node on the main net (the testnet node is still running for the testnet faucet for the time being) (01/02/2023)
• my lightning demo store (unblur) will be gone... Resources needed vs visitors served wasn't in equilibrium... I stopped running a lightning node anyways (03/02/2023) [/li
  

A quick resource estimation for the services i've turned off:

• A full node: 0.5 Tb of disksize, at least a couple vCPU's and a couple Gb of ram
• A btcpayserver: A full node
• A lightning node: A full node
• A lightning demo node: A lightning node + 0.5Gb of data... And a LAMP stack

[examplens]

I'm always sorry when I see an enthusiast give up his projects, especially because of the high maintenance costs.
You say that you earn around $100 per year and I must say that it is quite a decent amount considering that your site has a very weak SEO score. I am sure that if you devoted yourself a little to SEO optimization, you would have significantly better results.

This thread of more of a reference i can post a link to on every tool i want to turn off in the coming days/weeks, so i don't have to explain myself yet again.

I would be grateful if you could post links with a possible description of the server requirements for each of them. maybe we can find a solution at least for some of the services.

[mocacinno]

@examplens: you're right, mocacinno.com by itself certainly isn't SEO (nor advertising) optimized, and i could probably gain a lot more money... But the thing is: i don't want to dive into google's algorithms on how to make a site google likes and how to convert bitcoin related traffic to cash.
By the way, those $100 is on a (very) good year, and is the combination of all the advertising on all the domains i run + my tipjar... I think the last 12 months however, i haven't sold a single hardware wallet and haven't received a single tip. so last year my income was $0

It was always a hobby for me... One that became to expensive for me to run... Don't get me wrong, i'm a tad bit sad i have to do this, but for me it's not the worst thing in the world. I'll probably keep a couple of projects running if they can be fitted into some cheap shared hosting provider's package... But the more resource-intensive ones are gone i'm afraid.

I'll update the thread with an approximation of the resources needed for my public projects, but honestly, it's fine to let them go aswell. There was a lot of "crap" i coded in the past... Things that were functional but had no design and no real target audience... Good riddance

By the way, in case you're interested, the next project i'm going to downsize is the tld itself... My bitcoin tools were once written 100% in php, i even shared the sourcecode with some other members at that time (Lauda pops to mind). After the code became obsolete i started to rewrite the main functionality in go, and that's the version that has been running ever since. It's completely open source so you can run it at any server you have laying around: https://github.com/mocacinno/mocacinno.com . But this was a project i never finished anyways, so in order for this to be a functional server, you'd have to invest a lot of time implementing all the functionality i never fixed

[NotATether]

@examplens: you're right, mocacinno.com by itself certainly isn't SEO (nor advertising) optimized, and i could probably gain a lot more money... But the thing is: i don't want to dive into google's algorithms on how to make a site google likes and how to convert bitcoin related traffic to cash.

You'd be better off not trying. I've been trying to optimize my pages for two years using various plugins and techniques, but at the end of the day, all they care about is how many sites are linking back to yours. Which of course is impossible to increase when you hardly have time to make a full commitment to your side projects in the first place.

Putting in 300% for a few months and then going full autopilot is one thing, but that's not a one-man show.

[mendace]

I understand that you are in a situation where you need to cut down on your costs and thus have decided to turn off some of your services, including a full node, btcpayserver, lightning node and a lightning demo store. This is a difficult decision but it is important to prioritize expenses in a way that works for you and your situation.

I hope that your transition goes smoothly and that you are able to find alternative solutions that meet your needs and allow you to continue contributing to the Bitcoin ecosystem in other ways. If you need any help or support, don't hesitate to reach out to the community.