Oh man. I relate so much to this. When I was 15 me and my friends really liked playing online MMOs. We used to enjoy chatting on VoIP program, but this softwar

Oh man. I relate so much to this. When I was 15 me and my friends really liked playing online MMOs. We used to enjoy chatting on VoIP program, but this software required a server which all clients would need to connect to. We always thought it would be cool to host our own servers for this VoIP software instead of paying someone else to host one for us so I decided to dig out an old computer and set it up in the corner of my bedroom to use as a server. We got the server software installed and then realised we could probably sell these online if we knew how to build a website. To cut a long story short, we ended up teaching ourselves how to create a website with HTML, which eventually lead to learning how to program in PHP so we communicate with the VoIP software programmatically via Telnet and send emails, then eventually how take payments. It took us a few months in total, but we did it. And this back before YouTube tutorials or useful programming blogs. You were mostly trying to work things out on your own so it felt like a real achievement. One of the best moments of my life was receiving our first paid subscriber. I'll never forget the night my friend called me to tell me the news. And this was back when us teens had pay as you go phones so it was odd to get a call - especially that late at night. Funnily enough we probably used that old computer in the corner of my room as our server for about a year until one night someone hacked into it. Never really worked out what they were trying to do but they managed to install some remote desktop software on their because because I got woke up one night by the computer restarting then someone remotely controlling the computer. It was kinda spookey at the time. As you can image we paid for a dedicated server in the end, but it was such a fun adventure and that's why I'm here on HN today. The idea a couple of 15 year olds could set up a server in their bedroom and make some money was really inspiring. Things are different now I think. We were one of just a handful of VoIP hosts back then. Today we would be buried by Google and people would probably complain about the server taking 50ms too long to respond. You'd need to spend $1,000 on adwords and have EC2 instances around the world just to be in for a chance.