Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike-cardwell | Hacker News Reader

Get a $5/month VPS from Digital Ocean, learn how to configure and administer Apache or Nginx or both. Write a website using PHP. That seems to be where most of the jobs/money is here in the UK atm.

If you do all that, you can sell yourself as a sysadmin/developer. You can get a full time job. You can contract on the side, or full time. There's enough work out there in the UK if you have these skills.

View on HN

Hi, thanks for the advice. I've been working at a web development company for about a year (having had very little experience beforehand). I've mainly been working on sites in php and .net, though I'd really like to learn something that will contribute to my future career options and allow me to expand my portfolio. It seems like everyone on hacker news loves python, ruby or node, so I'd like to have a go at a larger project with one of them, I'm just being indecisive with hosting (I also have about zero cash, so the cheapest hosting would be preferable).

With such servers you can configure php or whatever you want really easily. Then you can backup all and rollback if you screw it.

I honestly would not touch php. (not flame bait)

Yes, host your own, it does not matter what, but make it your own. Write your own CMS, at least that way you see why its worth not doing it again. You will end up teaching yourself basic SEO, sensible deployment and backup processes.

Its well worth the effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com