(EDIT: Was at $15k per month last October before the competition started getting crazy)
About $2.5K per month hosting websites.
Then consulting income - I keep consulting because I feel like at any moment, the Android Market ranking algorithm will change or competition will wipe me out, etc, it's just to day-to-day to walk away from good old consulting.
Could you elaborate on the "hosting websites" bit? What scale and size of sites are you talking about and what sorts of clients are you hosting? Are they all just your consulting clients?
I work with another developer to do web development projects, and I always felt like hosting would be an easy way to get some additional income from our clients. He maintains that it's just too much of a systems administration headache to be worth it.
I host a couple hundred sites on dedicated servers. Mostly local business sites.
Hosting was hands down the dumbest move I ever made. I pay tons for servers, I'm fielding "I get too much spam" support requests several times weekly. Managing backups is a nightmare, then there's the endless responsibility of keeping the sites up and running. It's like jail I pay to live in.
That being said, I'm SLOWLY moving everyone to Rackspace Sites. Once everyone has moved, I think many of my headaches will be gone. Their email system is great and gets rid of 75% of my support requests.
So your issue is mostly with email-related support issues?
I'm working on something and considering if hosting will be a bigger headache than it's worth and if I can get away without offering it. I'm thinking I can't and that it won't be bad anyway.
I expect to keep things limited in scope so don't anticipate the issues you're having but I'm concerned that I might be overly optimistic.
Yes. I would say email is the #1 headache by far. Going with Rackspace Cloud and their email solution is helping A LOT. I'm moving my biggest accounts over, and they seem much happier, and I get virtually no support requests from them anymore regarding email. Amazing relief.
For 1 - it's expensive how I have it setup. I have dedicated servers and am running full-server backups nightly with 5-day archives. It takes more dedicated machines to do this. I need to find another solution.
With Rackspace Cloud Sites, they say they backup regularly for me, yes. They recommend MySQL backups on our own etc, but it's got me covered for the catastrophic situations I believe.
(EDIT: Was at $15k per month last October before the competition started getting crazy)
About $2.5K per month hosting websites.
Then consulting income - I keep consulting because I feel like at any moment, the Android Market ranking algorithm will change or competition will wipe me out, etc, it's just to day-to-day to walk away from good old consulting.