Wow. This is so useful. I'm always left a bit speechless when I come across something really useful like this. It should be a first stop for all would be entrepreneurs. Thanks.
I maintain an analytics tool for a large newspaper. I wrote the code for it in PHP 13 years ago. The app has been running without interruption for 13 years and is used by hundreds of employees every day. Still, it needs a bit of maintenance (APIs change). The code is scary and I will probably maintain the project for the rest of my life because anyone else would pull their hair out. I'm not proud of it and write better code in the meantime, but rewriting all the code from 13 years ago would be way too expensive for the company.
I work as a freelancer, but I wanted also to work on some side projects. After 4 years I make more money with my side projects than with my freelancer jobs. Normally I work 30% as a freelancer and spend 70% of my time working on my projects. As a freelancer, you have still people (=clients) who tell you what to do, but with your side project, you are your own boss. you can work really fast and try new stuff out, it's much more fun.
I'm running to B2B SaaS with subscriptions. The more customers I have, the more time I spend on support tickets or billing stuff. I'm really bad at self-discipline, but after 6 years working from home I finally find a routine that works for me. I start working very early (around 4-5 a.m.) and try to keep my afternoon for my own projects or time outside. I also try not to use social media before 1 pm.
I've stopped judging myself when I sometimes have days where I do absolutely nothing. It's fine. I like to relax my mind and wander off a bit. There are other days coming where I'm working till late and are much more productive.
Looks like with some dead basic optimisations (free versions of WP Fastest Cache and Autoptimise), my Wordpress site can handle around 1500 requests per second on a $5 DigitalOcean VPS before it starts to slow down.
On the old site, running on a shared host with less optimisations it would crap out at less than 10!
Seems like I don't need to worry about this after all.