Help a fellow in need

Hello,

First of all, thank you for reading my thread, it means a lot to me if you clicked with the intent to help.
I am a guy working as IT support in a datacenter, so i pretty much have access to VPS/dedicated servers, domain name registrations, and such. I also have a lot of PHP/Mysql experience, i think i can create some scripts or edit/modify anything to achieve own goals.

I would like some suggestions as to what i could do so i could earn extra bucks, if possible, on autopilot after some time (i can work on the method at the start).

I have tried doing some freelance stuff regarding PHP programming, mysql, and related jobs but its too overcrowded by small bids from other guys, rarely winning some projects.

I was thinking about some automated uploading maybe ?

Open to all suggestions, i am really willing to try, so please try to be serious about it.

Thank you !

Look, i'm going to just say it, essentially what we all want to tell you is to stop looking for autopilot, especially if you want worthwhile money anytime in the next few years. Judging by your words on the PHP programming and mySQL, I suspect you've been looking at a lot of freelance sites like freelancer or upwork. You are bound to get underbid, and while there are some people who really pay what they should be paying for experts, those people are also most certainly looking for people with reviews and experience visible on the platform itself.

However, your skills are not too far under demanded and you could find work looking where others don't look as often, or by creating an inbound system of leads for your freelance services. Start with your own website, and these can be really inexpensive I promise. Since you understand PHP get involved with Wordpress, and you might find your skills useful for creating a truly unique Wordpress website. HTML/CSS will help too, but those are simple enough to learn and the code is easy to copy and paste to use. Invest time and money in your freelance service and it's lead generation like you would an actual business ( Because it is, it's just one person ) and you can see success.

if you really want to work on something 'passive' the closest thing you'll find lots of information on here, is definitely a money site. A website that funnels traffics to income sources like Adsense, Amazon affiliates, adult offers, and all other kinds of affiliate offer websites, like Clickbank and Commission Junction. These will require work and investment to really succeed, and expecting a profit turnaround in the first 3 months is not exactly a healthy mindstate. But once you have a site that ranks for keywords that get you traffic that buys into your offers, these things can run effectively on autopilot for short periods of time between content updates. But I guarantee you'll find yourself wanting to improve the income from your site and investing more effort and money into improving it when you see reasonable returns.

You're right about the freelance programming market being a hell for someone that needs a decent salary. But about the autopilot method, I don't believe in 100$ passive methods because they always require some work every now and then, and usually a lot of work at the beginning. Take for example microniches, they require a lot of initial work to rank but after that, they sustain almost by themselves, you just need some posts occasionally and new backlinks.
With programming knowledge you can try creating automated websites, online tools or mobile apps.