I've been working on this website for a few years now. It has been live for about 18 months, but I started working on this website a few years before that in my spare time. In fact, I've been wanting to build something like this since probably 2012, or even earlier. At the time I was just digging around code in WordPress seeing how that system worked and creating blogs or simple websites with it at an internship I had at the time.
At that time my programming skills were nowhere close to what I needed, and I knew this. I wanted to build something massive and super cool for the skate community and others, so I just patiently waited until I felt ready to build this website.
Move forward to today and I finally have this website live, though nowhere close to what I have envisioned for it. (More on that in future blog posts)
I still work on this website in my spare time. Though I have ads displaying, the website itself is not yet paying for itself. It costs around $100 dollars to run this site per month and Adsense hasn't come close to paying for that just yet. Last month the site made about $2.50.
In all honesty, the server costs are higher than needed just because I created the system to be ready to scale up easily. If I went with a much cheaper server setup it would be much harder to scale up in the future, and I didn't want to have to worry about that if the time came to scale up.
I'm not worried though. God willing I got a lot of time to keep working on this little by little and continue to make it the awesomeness I've been thinking about for a long time.