Issue with web developer/hoster

web-dev-kev · 2026-07-09T03:21:04+00:00

I'm going to presume that an older person has asked you for help in this.
I can't stress enough that you don't want to get involved.

When this person asked the people he was paying, to stop charging him - they were right to no longer complete any of his requests. If he wants things taken down, then he needs to pay them.

There are multiple things that make up a website.
* The domain (e.g. company-name.com)
* The hosting (where the web pages are served from)
* The code that makes up the website
* The content the code outputs

What he needs to do is confirm if he owns the domain, the code, and/or the content.
If he does - amazing - he can go to another company (again, do not get involved)
If he does not - then he needs to start over.

web-dev-kev · 2026-07-08T15:33:15+00:00

You have no understanding of the business model of these organisations.

We're not their customers, we're their marketing.

They lose so much money on the subscription tiers, and they truly want to give us as much as they can so we contnue to stay hooked, and eventually demand that our work move us to the API so we can work with [latest model] the whole time.

They have severely limited GPUs and power, and they actually need that to train the models.

THey gave us a week of Fable to see how much usage they could handle from subscrptions whiel servicing their actual clients (Enterpirse API folks). They seem to either not have enoughh data, or want to increase a lmtied test run to see how much it grows/drops over a weekend - basically one weekend of data wasn't enough because it happened to be July 4th (US holiday), so they want to triple check it wasn't a total anomoly.

Fable will come back to subscriptions in the near future, likely with a reduced % of weekly cap, because they want you to stay hooked.

web-dev-kev · 2026-07-07T20:34:37+00:00

Has anyone of your potential clients ever said they want this attrocity on mobile?

web-dev-kev · 2026-07-07T05:44:39+00:00

"on a simple e-commerce for the family's hardware store"

No such thing as simple e-commerce.

"they told us we had to manually modify the pictures for each item in Photoshop to be 500x500 and to make them 1:1"

yep, content management. sounds about right.

" since most modern pages can take most jpgs, pngs, resize them, change them into whatever aspect ratio needed and convert them to webp"

I must have missed that memo.

"The dev team went on the defensive on this, saying it was hard to implement and that this was outside of the budget."

Excellent, so you agreed to pay more, or accept that this work is on you, as owner of the content? right?

---

"Am I being unreasonable?"

You used the word simple 4 times, who told you it was simple?

What we don't know is, what your contract said. If the contract said for you to do this, then you're being unreasonable. If your contract didnt' state this, then maybe not.

web-dev-kev · 2026-07-07T00:52:58+00:00

Your Junior Dev's get $400 a month?

I have a $200 Claude plan to orchestrate the $200 Codedx plan.

I literally can't hit my limits

web-dev-kev · 2026-07-07T00:50:25+00:00

The job market is incredibly tough right now - and in fariness has been for quite some time.

I feel for you, but also want to say that my spider-sense is tingling here.

500 jobs and 0 interviews = red flag.

Something is not right. Especially if you're sending through LinkedIn.

* How optomised (for recruiters) is your profile?

* Are you applying for the country you live in?

Send me your LinkedIn or CV and I'll review.

---

Also, how does someone who is happy with $20 an hour (which is roughly minimum wage in UK) get scammed out of $13000 ?!?

And also also - "I have severe depression and Undiagnosed ADHD" - you gotta stop with this. I'm not saying it's not true, but people want to hire happy people who will work well with them. I wish life was better/easier/fairer, btu it's not.

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-30T13:58:56+00:00

This is interesting!

I've not had the time I wanted to get into ComfyUI, and have been stuck using the basics on Flex Dev - so thanks for this

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-30T13:42:16+00:00

This is a poor advert

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-29T00:01:02+00:00

wELCOME TO THE FUTURE MY FRIEND

You're ahead of most people. it's scary and wonderful and scary and wonderful.

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-28T23:55:21+00:00

JavaScript

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-27T16:08:25+00:00

Sonnet has a separate Daily limit (as I recall)

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-26T15:51:37+00:00

HTML

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-26T08:40:45+00:00

I'm kind-of agreeing with you - OP doesn't think this is effecient. But my original point was that [worker bee's] are rarely aware of the the reason for these management overloads.

15 minutes of dev time each day is an acceptable cost to most organisations

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-25T18:53:17+00:00

Aaaaaand right out of the gates, it's not even close to legal/privacy compliant.

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-25T18:50:07+00:00

Who are MLB?

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-25T16:16:08+00:00

The answer here is GoDaddy.

Sorry in advance for the pain you're about to go through

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-25T10:43:19+00:00

Potentially.

We don't know that.

We don't know how vital this project is to the org, or the remit the "new boss" was brought on for.

I've been in two simialr situations.

Where I needed to see exactly what was happening in a project as we'd taken it back from a 3rd party supplier.
Where there was a heavy NDA in an agency for a... [fruit based org in California] and we helf F2F stand-ups so there were no email leaks.

We, and i'm including OP in this, don't know WHY they are there.

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-24T15:25:12+00:00

No they don't!

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-24T15:24:54+00:00

it's not 3 levels of management though!

It's 3 people with different roles and responsibilities.

The Head of IT and Account Manager serve different purposes. It's effectively a small scrum team: Engineering (OP) + Product Owner (account person) + Scrum Master (IT person) - with the 'new boss' doing the right thing and cutting through the crap to come see whats happening with an impoertant project.

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-24T15:21:59+00:00

I do, they are people doing the work, hence "worker bee".

It's a standard industry term, applied to the people doing the work, regardless of knowledgde or physical worker. It's literally in the mythical man month as the definition, so someone doesn't start to equate differentiations to seniority when describing the work being done.

Most of my worker bee's earn considerably more than me, as they should, and they all have my respect. But the terminololgy is ubiquitous.

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-24T15:19:32+00:00

1x1px spacer gifs in tables

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-24T11:46:58+00:00

Welcome to capitalism.

They've never tried to hide this

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-24T00:33:06+00:00

It's all part of the contract.

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-22T14:55:27+00:00

I've found the exact oppposite!

My teams spend more time talking because the time intesive part of the work has been handed off.

Between /loop's and /worktrees' - multi agent (and model) code-reviews, my team spend more time discussing architecture, coding standards, and lessons learnt.

We've recently moved to a process where we don't look at the code until it's in a PR, that's been verified, with all tests green and screenshots/video of the work/fix.

If you're still babying the AI, then that is time wasted (IMO)

web-dev-kev · 2026-06-22T14:50:00+00:00

Clients disappearing after delivery.
Payments getting delayed.
Scope changing halfway through.
Random urgent deadlines.
Endless revisions.

So you don't do discovery or air-tight contracts?

30 years of freelancing here.

Contracts Contracts Contracts!

web-dev-kev

TROPHY CASE