The most useful thing I learned: constraints you don't choose are better product decisions than constraints you invent. I'm running a link shortener on shared

The most useful thing I learned: constraints you don't choose are better product decisions than constraints you invent. I'm running a link shortener on shared hosting. No SSH, FTP-only deploys, no background workers, no Redis. Every time I wanted to add something "proper" — a job queue, a WebSocket, a cache layer — the hosting said no. So I didn't. The result: click notifications go out via a cron job that hits a PHP endpoint once an hour. No queue, no retry logic, no worker process. It either sends or it doesn't, and I log the outcome. Six months in, it works fine. If I'd had a VPS from day one I'd have built something I'd still be maintaining. The shared hosting said "you get a cron and a database" and that turned out to be enough.