Google’s generous free-tier limits once made Gemini an ideal platform for experimenting with LLM-powered applications. When those limits quietly changed, a YouTube recommendation system that had worked reliably for months suddenly stopped functioning. This post recounts that experience and explores what it reveals about the hidden risks of building on third-party AI platforms.

After four years on DigitalOcean, I explored cheaper VPS alternatives and evaluated OVH as a potential replacement. Through load testing and hardware analysis, OVH proved faster, more scalable, and better equipped to handle traffic thanks to more CPU cores, additional RAM, and efficient PHP process management. This comparison highlights the importance of assessing both hardware and software configuration when choosing a hosting provider.

I am not a web designer by training, yet web design has been a recurring part of my work for nearly two decades. Building single page applications means dealing with HTML, CSS, and layout decisions whether one enjoys it or not. For a long time, I approached web design pragmatically, learning just enough to make things work, while never feeling fully in control of the result. Recently, that changed.