cmaxwe

I had never really created anything before and wanted to learn Rails.

Built it and have been paying $10/mo in hosting for the last two years. I use it and have around 30 active users (couple hundred non-active). So I kind of keep it going just because I realize that the 30 people who use it have invested a lot of time entering scores and stuff.

My monetization strategy was to get traffic and rely on Google ads.

Me too. The first two were great. Looking forward to the next book in the Mistborn series from Sanderson too.

Book two of the wheel of time.

Have never read them before...it is a lot of books.

Seems completely unnecessary to me.

Buy the Learn Web Development with Ruby on Rails by Michael Hartl(http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book)

It makes everything make sense. :-)

What I did find though was that if I looked for games where my estimated accuracy rate was high and the odds were good then I probably could have bet on those games for a profit but they were very rare.

It took me a fairly long time to setup the dev environment so I was a bit pissed.

I had a Linode 512 and switched to a 2x512 Dropplet setup and put my Database on one 512 and my Rails app server on the other.

My stuff runs as quickly if not quicker and I spend $10/mo less. In addition to this I also have a clear scaling path (e.g. If my DB grows I can up it to a 1gb. If my traffic grows I can either move the app server to a 1gb or maybe get a few more 512's and setup a load balancer.)

Using your logic that you could use Bitcoin to hide things on your CC statement I am guessing the use case for most people is hiding things from their spouses.

Even BitInstant and Coinbase are kind of clunky and require the user to have an understanding of how Bitcoins work. (e.g. understand wallets, etc). That is the nice thing about Paypal...you can either login and pay with your paypal account or use them as a CC processor if you don't have an account.