When LPZ started I built it on Ruby on Rails and hosted it on Railway. And that was fine for a while. I still like Rails, and Railway has been perfectly fine host.
However the quantity of bot related traffic has been driving up the cost of hosting. The amount of bots and AI hitting the site has at times been obscene, to the point that we’d see 100,000 visitors per month according to our server side analytics tool (active_analytics), but less than 500 a month based on our client side analytics tool (google analytics). It was not a lot of money, but more than I wanted to spend.
So this weekend I decided to build a static site on Astro and host it on my shared Dreamhost account. The site has lost a bit of functionality, like viewing active and recommended sites. However for the time being all the data is here, and we’re hoping to add that stuff back as time goes on.
Hoping to continue to be a valuable resource for independent SaaS Startups. Here’s to new beginnings and using technology that we’re already paying for.