u/planerist

For me it is important that the website works without interruptions, but even more important that it does not get hacked. My website was already hacked before, and it took several days to restore it. Since then security, timely updates and account isolation became much more important for me than saving a few dollars per month.

I don't mind paying more if it saves me from security problems. I see that people here recommend Bluehost, Hostinger and SiteGround.

What I mostly want to get right is account isolation, so that if one site gets compromised, it can't spread to the others on the account. Which hosts have actually held up on that for you, rather than just claiming it?

I realized last week I had no real handle on how our brand shows up inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini. So I started digging into what tools people actually use for AI mentions, citations, and share of voice. Ended up putting together a short list of the ones that kept coming up across threads and reviews.

The list covers about five tools that handle multi-engine tracking, prompt-level monitoring, and competitor benchmarking. Some are budget-friendly options around $20-50/month, others are more enterprise-grade with predictive analytics and workflow integrations. I also noted what engines each one supports, most cover ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, but a few also track Copilot and Meta AI.

What I found valuable is that the category is moving fast. It's not just about ranking in Google anymore, it's about whether your brand gets cited as a source or recommended as an option inside AI answers. Having a reference like this saved me from trialing random tools blind. For example, I compared Profound, Peec AI, and Semrush AI visibility side by side and noticed big differences in pricing and feature depth depending on your team size.

I don't have a link to share since it's just my notes, but if you're in the same boat, trying, to figure out what to track first, maybe start with a multi-engine tool that also gives you sentiment and share-of-voice reports. That alone beats guessing.

I'm still testing a few of these myself.

in particular, we are trying to evaluate the call quality, outbound dialing and the real cost of one seat in mightycall compared to ringcentral after counting all add-ons. in every comparison article they just list the features. want to hear the opinion of people who at some point had one of them active or both at once? what actually mattered when you were calling?

What I'm after is pretty simple: a chatbot that's free, unlimited, uncensored, and doesn't forget everything after ten messages. I used to use Hangjam and it was incredible, huge memory context, lorebooks, responses over 4k characters, and you could even swap your own prompt mid-conversation. But now it's pay-only and I can't afford that.

I've tried a bunch of alternatives and wanted to share what I found, in case anyone else is in the same boat. Character AI is better on censorship than it used to be, but the memory is still weak and characters don't stay in character if your description is too long. Janitor AI used to be great but now it's broken and responses don't make sense. HiAI was good but also pay-only now. Crushon, Chub, Dopple, Polybuzz, Talkie, they all feel kinda the same, with limited memory and small personality fields. Charsnap is decent but super censored for dark topics, even if you're just talking about real life stuff. Loremate was a try but no. Xoul AI vanished, which sucks because I loved it, it was one of the few that actually did NSFW properly.

I looked at the narrative-focused ones like EroPlay and Spicychat too, but those are paywalled for anything real, so they're out on price before I even get to the memory problem.

Anyone else found something that actually works? Free, unlimited, uncensored, and with decent memory? I'm not looking to run models locally on my laptop, and APIs are out of budget.

I've been a Vimeo customer for like 7+ years. The platform itself used to be decent, but their customer service has completely gone to shit. For over a month I've been trying to update my company info so I can get a proper invoice, and every time I get a reply from a different support person who clearly hasn't read my ticket. I have to explain the whole thing from scratch each time. Still no fix.

This is killing my workflow because I need to share private video drafts with my editors. They can't access new uploads while my account is stuck in billing limbo. I'm seriously looking for an alternative where I can just upload, set permissions, and move on without this nonsense.

I've already tried chat and email, same cycle. Anyone else run into this? I'm looking at Wistia, Kinescope, and Cloudflare Stream. Stream I know is more of a build-it-yourself deal, and honestly after a month of this I'm almost willing to write the code myself out of pure spite. But mainly I just need something that plays nice with sharing links + permissions and has decent analytics. What do you use for hosting client drafts that editors can review or download without the drama?

I've run a Kotlin (Ktor) backend with a strongly-typed TypeScript frontend for years, almost since Ktor's early days. And I've wanted the same thing the whole time: end-to-end type safety, Kotlin types flowing through to the frontend with no hand-written contract in the middle. Without paying for it with a toolchain that takes seconds just to boot, or ships a hundred features nobody uses. That combination has never had an obviously-right answer, and one option burned me badly enough that I finally want to hear what everyone else does.

gRPC / gRPC-Web. Solid on the Kotlin side, but the browser path means a proxy (Envoy/Caddy) or protoc plus a stack of codegen deps. Heavy and finicky.

ConnectRPC (connect-kotlin + connect-web). The one everyone points to as the modern fix, and honestly it's why I'm posting. I actually tried it. The setup was awful, the docs were thin and out of date, it was far more complicated than the problem warranted, and I kept hitting reliability issues I could never pin down. Maybe I held it wrong, but "just use Connect" has not matched my experience at all. Am I alone, or have others bounced off it too?

kotlinx.rpc (JetBrains). Really nice if both ends are Kotlin (KMP / Compose Multiplatform), but not aimed at a real TS frontend. Same with kilua-rpc. Kotlin-to-Kotlin, not Kotlin-to-strongly-typed-TS.

GraphQL (graphql-kotlin). Works, carried a couple of my projects. But it forces a shape on everything (no cyclic types, a whole schema/resolver layer), and for plain internal RPC it's more machinery than the problem needs.

OpenAPI + a TS generator. This is where it doesn't fit me: I change and evolve the API fast, and I want the whole contract living in code, driven by Kotlin types, not a separate spec I have to keep in sync. And the generated clients are clunky and drift the moment you stop babysitting them.

I eventually caved and hacked together my own code-first thing years ago. (It started life as a frankenstein: a TypeScript stub generator bolted onto a Kotlin GraphQL subscription implementation.) Kotlin interfaces to generated TS types plus a thin RPC/subscriptions client, typed end to end. It's carried several production apps and is genuinely simpler to set up than any of the above.

So, for a Kotlin backend and a strongly-typed TypeScript frontend in 2026, what are you actually using, and what did you give up to get there? Especially want to hear from anyone genuinely happy with Connect in prod, because I couldn't get there.

PS: it's actually sitting open source on my github already, so it's not that I'm hiding it. I just never point anyone at it or treat it as a real project, because of that frankenstein origin. It's battle-tested across years of production, but I gave up on ever hand-cleaning it into a proper project I could put in front of the community, so I just let AI pull it out into a standalone dependency instead. And "runs fine in my own prod" and "ready to recommend to strangers" are very different bars. So it stays my private duct tape for now, technically open source but nothing I'd actually send you to.

I built a blog for a friend's tiny local business and used an AI pipeline to pump out 70-something articles fast and cheap. The humbling part: almost all of them are noise. One single article is 98% of the traffic, and it's the one where I ignored the model and gathered the real local prices by hand. Here's what that taught me about small, non-English markets.

She runs an interior-design studio and had zero ad budget, so cheap volume felt like the obvious play. It sat at basically nothing for a while, then climbed fast once it caught: 5 clicks one month, then 22, then 147, then over 400. Then the part that got me. It flattened at around 400 clicks a month and just stayed there. No new posts, no links, no maintenance for months, and it hasn't slipped.

When I finally pulled Search Console, one article had 1,409 of the site's 1,444 clicks. About 98%. The other 70-something combined are a rounding error. And it's the most boring piece on the site: a renovation cost estimate for a specific apartment size, with actual prices per square meter, stage-by-stage timelines, even the seasonal price swings. Every number gathered by hand, not guessed by a model. It sits at average position 3.9 and quietly eats everything.

It took off for one reason. In a market where every other result is a vague classified listing or an article too scared to print a real number, being the one page that says what it actually costs is the whole game. In a saturated English niche, those same 70 AI articles would be 70 pieces of slop nobody ever sees. In a tiny non-English market with almost no competition, a cheap pipeline can still land a winner, and even here the volume did nothing. One page, built on real data, did all of it.

The CTR is the part I still find wild. Site-wide it's 11%, but the money queries look nothing like English SERPs. One sits at position 1.0 with a 52% CTR. Another 33%. Another 19%. In English those would be 2-5%, because ten results and an ad stack are all fighting for the click. Here there's almost nothing else, so ranking and getting the click are nearly the same thing.

So the lesson wasn't that AI content works, or that you should just publish more. It was the opposite. The volume was basically free and basically worthless. One deep, data-backed article that answered a real local question outranked and outlasted everything else I made, with zero upkeep. That's the whole story.

Anyone else working a small or non-English market see this same power-law, where one well-researched piece carries the whole site while the rest do nothing? What did your winner have that the rest didn't?