r/webdev

A suspected major data breach at Adobe, allegedly by a hacker called “Mr. Raccoon,” may have exposed millions of records via a third-party Indian BPO. Reports claim up to 13 million support tickets, 15,000 employee records, and HackerOne submissions were accessed. Adobe hasn’t confirmed the breach, but shared evidence suggests serious gaps in access control and vendor security.

I recently switched from Node/Express, Alpine, and Handlebars to SvelteKit and I have to say, it has been a game changer.

No more manually creating routes, wiring everything together, or dealing with middleware. SvelteKit’s file-based routing, built-in data loading, and reactive UI make building full-stack apps much smoother.

If you are coming from a traditional Node/Express setup, I highly recommend giving it a try.

I built a testing company and the irony is I still feel this every single day, when we catch something critical before it ships the first reaction is rarely thank you it's more like why didn't we know about this earlier as if finding the problem isn't the whole point.

started this because I genuinely believed quality was something teams wanted to invest in, and they do, but only after something breaks in production, the appetite for testing is always highest the week after a bad release and then slowly fades until the next one.

maybe that's just human nature but it's a strange thing to build a company around, the thing everyone agrees is important but nobody prioritizes until it's too late.

Context - I manage a cybersecurity team for a financial services firm. One of the areas I'm responsible for is building the data loss prevention policies, which requires testing for email and web content inspection. Historically we've used 3rd party sites to upload test files and send emails to, failed uploads aligned with system entries validate successful blocks etc. All relatively straightforward however I would like to build our own site for such uploads.

I have a CS background though that was nearly 20 years ago and web development was never really my jam though I expect things have moved on significantly since then, React wasn't a thing the last time I messed around with web dev. In short, I don't know what I don't know, so just looking for a steer in the right direction and I'm happy to do the heavy lifting.

The basic functionality would be accepting file uploads and text through form entry, log the attempt and immediately delete the content. I'll wrap the usual security around it, authentication, input sanitization, file size restrictions and so on. I'd also like to host an SMTP server that would log emails sent to a particular address - source, subject, timestamp then delete the content.

Since this is more a tool to solve other problems I'm ideally not looking to reinvent the wheel or create anything groundbreaking, nor am I going to change careers anytime soon just looking for advice on the simplest way to tackle the problem. I've had some success with Claude building the site and wrapping it into a Docker container but then that would need hosting somewhere that's accessible from the corporate network and definitely not my home, and all the challenges that come with that.

Are there any out-the-box type hosting companies that would work with some tweaking, or am I better off running a linux VM on a Digital Ocean droplet and manage the lot through Docker/Podman/Kubernetes etc?

Making decent money off a side project now and I just realized my entire financial setup is stripe payouts going into my personal checking account and a google sheet I update when I remember to, no business account no invoicing nothing.

I know I need to get this together especially before tax season but every time I sit down to figure it out I end up just working on the product instead because thats the fun part. Are you guys actually organized with this stuff or is everyone just winging it like me?

For my college capstone project, the professor wants my team to create a new website for him that compiles information from his personal website (mostly links to books he's written), his google scholar page (links to papers), and a GitHub page that links to AI, VKD software his students made. That part is simple.

The tricky part is: "The website should not be static but should allow a user to add more new sources and new links without coding but with a natural UI."

He specified in person that "the user" wouldn't be just anyone, but him or students.

His personal website is on dreamhosters.com, and he says he doesn't like that in order to edit it, he has to download the html file and edit it in word (roughly his words). He'd like a natural UI instead.

I have some familiarity with neocities, and I believe GitHub pages also always for simple website hosting, but I'm skeptical that those would let us create a self-editing website. I used to have a wordpress blog, and I know wordpress does give the user some nice UI, but I don't know that that would meet his needs.

Worst case would just be creating some offline UI to edit a downloaded HTML page I guess? But I don't think that would impress him much.

The output looks plausible enough to fool yourself into thinking the design problem is solved. It is not solved. It is deferred. And clients, users, or anyone with actual taste will eventually feel it even if they cannot articulate why.

Design sense is not a setting you turn on. In my experience it is something you build by making a lot of decisions, being wrong about them, and slowly developing an instinct for what actually works and why. There is no shortcut that deposits that into your head.

The people I have watched get genuinely good at this spent time designing things badly before they designed things well. AI skips that entire process and hands you something that looks like the destination without any of the miles.

Use it for reference, for speed, for iteration. But if you cannot look at the output and make twenty specific decisions about why something should change, you are not designing anything. You are just approving.

The gap between developers who can design and those who cannot is one of the more useful gaps to close if you do client work. Worth the uncomfortable years it takes to actually close it.

Hi, I recently started working at my family's agency and after reviewing the existing infrastructure, I realized the setup needs a serious overhaul.

Current portfolio:

• 40+ client websites (PHP / Laravel / WordPress)

All hosted on standard cPanel. The main pain points are no Git integration, restricted SSH access, and no standardized deployment process. Everything is done manually, which slows us down significantly.

Goals:

• Modern deployment workflow with Git and GitHub Actions
• A standardized WordPress starter kit we can reuse across clients
• Support for PHP, Laravel, and SvelteKit applications

Currently leaning toward managed hosting (Cloudways) over a self-managed VPS setup. Does this make sense at this scale, or am I overcomplicating things? (Limited server management experience, so security is a priority)

Hey guys,

I’ve been building sites for friends/family and am starting to take on real clients. I’m trying to get a realistic sense of pricing from people actually doing this work.

Current Project:

Local coffee shop w highly visual branding

• Standard pages + menu

• Online ordering w/ customization

• Integration w current payment system (square)

Context:

• I build custom (no template builders)

• I Include standard SEO / technical setup (performance, sitemap, schema)

Questions:

• What would you realistically charge for this?

• How much does custom vs builder actually impact pricing, and do clients care?

• What’s your typical range for a basic brochure site vs added features (ordering, booking, forms, portals)?

• Maintenance & hosting fees?

Not trying to undercut, just want to land in a fair range while I build experience. Appreciate any real numbers/examples.

Thanks in advanced 🙏🏻

Hello, everybody. I have recently been learning to work with Spring Boot and SQL to make websites. I need to know if I should keep using Spring Boot or should I switch to something like Supabase?

When I make the project using SQL I use local host for the database. Does local host work on the device I am running it on only or is there something that has to be done for it to send and retrieve data when other people run the website on their own devices?

I don't know how to make websites that can run miltiple accounts on them. Some people say I should learn JWT and sessions but others say something else. Like I want to make for a example a website where you can chat with other people. How would I make the website create multiple different accounts for each of the different users while also displaying the data on public posts each person can access? Similar to how twitter works where each person can create an account with a unique name, post tweets other people can read and send direct messages to other. How do I do that with SQL and Spring Boot/Supabase?

On the hosting side, how do I host full stack websites with a fronend, backend, and database. I have hosted static wesbites before using Vercel. Do I need to learn AWS or will the backend be enough by itself to run the projects on other devices or will I need to learn AWS or some other technology to create websites and apps that run well with multiple users on them?

I don't know the process I should follow for creating the full stack website, deploying it and running it from different devices. I would really appreciate your advice.

I work with medical practices (dental, derm, etc.) and I’m trying to refine our design/ build workflow for sites that prioritize patient bookings and local SEO.

Curious how others approach this space from a design/process standpoint:

How do you handle compliance constraints while still keeping UX clean and conversion-focused?

Do you design fully custom flows first or work within system constraints early?

What are the biggest pitfalls you’ve seen when designing for medical practices specifically?

Not as interested in specific tools, more how you think about the workflow and tradeoffs.

Hey everyone, I run a hosting comparison site and I'm looking to expand beyond the usual big names.

What smaller or lesser-known hosting providers are you actually using and happy with? Especially interested in:

- Niche providers (game servers, managed WordPress, dev-focused VPS)

- Regional providers that are great in specific markets (EU, Asia, LATAM)

- Providers with genuinely good price/performance that don't get talked about much

Not looking for affiliate recommendations, just real experience. Thanks!

First off all, I'm way, way out of my expertise on this so please be patient and I apologise if I'm completely wrong here or can't provide the infos needed.

So, at my workplace we run a webserver for our building automation system/SCADA which is connected via tunnel to a remote alarming service that handles phone calls and alert information for us.

The webservice is based on obsolete software and completely depreciated systems, it doesn't even offer https and still runs partially on a very old node.js framework and needs a very old Oracle JRE to display certain things and functions. Unfortunately I can't upgrade anything and I don't have any documentation or manualsd on anything since the software vendor has gone belly up in 2021 and my predecessors were utter morons. My higher ups are still debating what to do next.

The external alerting company runs an integrated alerting system which has MS Edge as viewer for alert related information.

Now the issue:

About a week ago that MS Edge in the alerting software has stopped properly displaying our SCADA webpage (to a point where it's completely non functional), the MS Edge debugger shows:

>WebSocket --identifier and timestamp---
connection to: "ws://---IP address---/ws"
failed: Error during WebSocket handshake: Unexpected response code: 503

Am I right in thinking this is an issue because our webserver isn't configured for https/wss and the browser or system in the alerting companys office expects or forces secure connections?