I have two fucking websites. One I live from.

These days, it's pretty demoralising to run a website. Google AI overviews and LLMs have reduced traffic by over 60%, and that trend shows no sign of slowing down. These numbers are typical.

At the same time, the cost and difficulty has raised because of misbehaving AI crawlers and bots attacking every moving part. I'm glad I went with static sites and not WordPress.

So you need to work harder and harder for a dwindling audience, and the cost of keeping the lights on keeps going up.

I used to make websites for businesses, a bit over a decade ago. The job feels just as hard now as it was back then. One notable exception is caddy and automatic SSL.