What triggered it
Too many half-finished projects blocked by infrastructure choices.
Goal
Create a durable hosting playbook for small products that can be deployed quickly and maintained solo.
What I did
Compared cPanel hosting, VPS costs, backup workflows, and the operational overhead of each choice; then rewrote project plans around boring deployability.
Summary notes
This was the cycle that finally separated 'cool stack' from 'good enough to ship.'
Lessons learned
- Shared hosting is underrated when the product needs to exist more than it needs to impress.
- Deployment friction kills more projects than imperfect architecture.
Mistakes and dead ends
- Spec'd future scale before proving present demand.
- Spent weeks on stack choice before locking content structure.