[@LegendBegins] It's just not worth it.

I learned this the hard way last year. When I first wrote the Guild from scratch in January 2014 right after Guildfall, I tried running my own servers/operations. Thought I was being smart/frugal. As the year went on and the Guild got busier and busier, I was spending more and more time dealing with operations instead of writing code. I made some wrong operations decisions and didn't have time to refactor the code, and that led to stagnant features and performance issues towards mid-/late-2014. I was just stretched too thin.

When I rewrote the Guild again in January 2015, I focused on outsourcing the operations so that I could focus on code. Now I can devote pretty much all my Guild-time to code which is why I've been able to make much better progress this year.

My process is really streamlined now which I realize is the most important thing to optimize for. When I write a patch or new feature, I can have it deployed to multiple servers within 60 seconds, and I can scale up/down the server count by click-and-dragging a slider. :lol