Happy birthday buddy. I am a week older! I can very much relate to the cutting out of 'stuff' and doing more productive things.
also when i price out cloud services for like 5,000 users costs are around 100-200 a month. You are going to want to kick them some money to run the instance if it's super important to you.
added a link to NJ Quake. see what the lan party scene was like back when I was in highschool/collage.