I am a front end development guy who loves freelancing as a hobby and also likes the part where I make some extra money for doing that ;-)<p>I had a solid Elance profile for last 7 years and now all of a sudden they suspended by account with a generic (quality purposes) reply as the reason.<p>Elance was a boon for me, at any point I feel like working, bid on a few projects and I get awarded almost within 3 hours.<p>I would stay off oDesk and Freelance because those are more like sweatshops and people are looking to hire people at $5 per job.<p>Now since I cannot use Elance anymore I was wondering where I could find people who would be interested in my service. A couple of forums helped fins some people who needed work but nothing like Elance.<p>Cheers!
Not all oDesk offers are $5/hr<p>If you have good portfolio and know how to write good cover letters you can easily get jobs at $25-$35 hr.<p>The key is to apply only for jobs where the client has good history of payments. Each oDesk client has an average $/hr rate, so keep that in mind.<p>Good luck!<p>(note: I have been using oDesk for 5 years)
Could you give us more info, what exactly happened?<p>Did you email de Elance team to ask why you got banned? If so what did they reply? Did you identify the client that flagged you, if so what did you wrote them, what did they say?<p>Is there a way to fix things with this client so they write to Elance asking to remove the ban?<p>I heard good things about toptal.com but their site says they expect to work through the night for the duration of the contract if on another timezone.<p>I looked into the Elance rates and I see rates of Java Developers at 5 dollars an hour, the same ones that you mention on oDesk and Freelance. Might as well switch to those.<p>Check <a href="https://weworkremotely.com/" rel="nofollow">https://weworkremotely.com/</a> from 37signals, careers.stackoverflow.com and jobs.github.com for remote work in general, but not necessarily short term freelancing.