I am sitting here on Saturday afternoon, early start, went for a 10k walk with my daughter, had lunch, then I sit at my desk and open this site.  It seems to be my routine on a Saturday now.  As well as late nights!  It still feels weird that this site, born out of a "hold my beer" moment and intended as a small personal property data site, has grown so much. Growth not only in relation to content but also in visitors.

On the visitors' statistics, once the bots are removed, the numbers are pretty incredible.  Right now, the site averages 10,000 unique visitors and delivers over 250,000 page views each month. It really does feel like a responsibility now, rather than just a side project started just 5 months ago!

Plan for 2026

The plan is simple: improve the site's look and feel and add data where it's available and useful.  I am one person with a full-time job.  Time is limited; therefore, I don't want the site content to grow to a point where it's a job in itself just to manage the data.  

Also, remember, this is not some faceless commercial site.  Nothing on this site is hidden behind a paywall.  And I have no intention of charging for any of it. I may seek a sponsor or two to cover real costs such as the server, but it's a side thought, not a requirement. I welcome all the feedback, where suggestions make sense and are within my capability, I will add them to my growing list of suggested changes.  What makes it worth doing all this is the significant amount of you telling me how useful the site is and what I could do to improve it.

You keep the feedback coming, and I will keep implementing what people want to see, where I can.  

Get in touch via Linkedin which most of you are doing, or log in to the site and use the support system I have built for users.

Q & A

I do my best to reply to everyone who gets in touch. I get a lot of the same requests; it's always down to where I spend my time, the site or responding to questions and comments.  Sometimes it's tough to get back to everyone, in a timely manner at least.

So I have jotted down a lot of similar-themed questions received over the last couple of months and covered them below.  Paraphrasing here and in no particular order.

How much AI are you using on the site?

Very little, I love AI tools, but for coding, I am not jelling with it yet.  Getting there, though.  Vibe Coding is a big thing right now, getting AI to write the code for you.  On this site, I am open to using it as it will reduce time.  I am fortunate that I learnt coding way before AI was a thing, so I don't really need it, but I see the potential.  It can very much can take hours of code written at my normal speed and reduced to mins via AI.  I can live with that,t and I am actively trying to make that work.

I did experiment with using AI on some of my blog posts in the past, but I didnt like the output, even writing it and asking AI to tidy it, just felt wrong. This post is all me, I prefer that, even if you don't :) If anyone is reading my posts, like this one and believes it's AI-written, thank you, I am better at writing than I thought!

Bottom line, I want AI to write my code on this site as much as possible by the end of Q1.  It would give me so much time back.

You have stopped writing in your blog about property in general. Why?

This was an interesting comment I got from a few people.  Before this site, I had a blog (merged with this site) and wrote all about property topics.  I didnt realise people found them that interesting.  To be honest, it was more a way for me to write things down that I wanted to remember and understand for the future myself.

The honest reason I stopped is simply time.  I spend so much on the data side of the site that the blog is just time I don't have.  But I do want to write more.  I will try to fix that.  If I can get AI to write more of the code faster, then that will give me more time to write articles.

Will you start charging for using the site?

As mentioned earlier, I have no plans for this, and I don't see a position later where I would need to.  Given the visitor numbers, it would be nice to get even a few small sponsors to cover server costs in return for a company logo on the site; that is about it.

All the data I use here is publicly available; I just put it in a format that I believe is more useful for anyone who is interested in it.  I see other sites charging for the same information, not criticising, not my business.

The only point I could see charging being a need is if the site got so popular that it required server resources beyond my budget.  I can't see that happening.

It's possible that all or even part of this freely available public data I use on this site becomes a charge to use.  That could be a problem.  Right now, I can't see that happening either.

Can you add x or y to the site?

I will add what makes sense; that's going to be an opinionated view, given I am the decision maker.  If there is data publicly available, regular and reliable, I will consider it, but I also have to consider how much more time will maintaing that add to the maintenance of the data on the site.

There is also the issue that some data does come at a cost.  Scotland is a prime example.  Where the Land Registry data in England and Wales is a free monthly download, the Scottish Government wants hundreds of pounds each month to use its data.  Nope.  If I were going to spend that, then charging for the service is the only option.

How much data do you have on the site? What DB do you use, and what about backups?

I have covered this before, but it keeps getting asked quite a lot.

The database I use is MySQL.  It was a fine choice when I started.  Looking back, I should have used PostgreSQL. Hindsight and all that!  There is a note on my to-do list, and it says "Convert to Postgres?".  If I can get AI to do what I want in terms of coding, I may go through the process of moving away from MySQL.  Many reasons for preferring Postgres over MySQL for this site, but I won't go into them here.

I have done some tidying of the database to make it as tight as I can. The screenshot below shows where it is currently.  Just over 104m rows taking up 88.5GB of space across c30 tables. That is a lot, but if you then break that down into pieces of data that need to be used, joined with other data and so on, it's huge, in my view.  If you look at it like a spreadsheet.  I now have over 1 billion cells of data I can access within the database.

I don't use any APIs here; all data is stored on the server, which is why it's faster than many other sites, and I cache a lot of the query results so visitors do not have to wait.

In terms of backups for the site.  I use the Ploi control panel make server management easier and includes automated backups.  My server is with Hetzner in Falkenstein.  I was using Amazon S3 to do daily backups, but it was getting expensive. Hetzner has multiple locations and offers S3-compatible object storage, which I have, but in their Helsinki data centre.  Backups every night to that, and I have a 4-drive Synology NAS at home which syncs to that storage.  They say that unless you have 3 copies of your critical data in different locations, it does not exist. I have that covered :)

What's your personal hardware and software setup 

I have an all-Apple setup. The reality is that for what I do, Mac is best.  I have a PC, and recently tried to replicate what I do on Mac with the PC; it was painful.

• 32 inch 4k LG montior
• Mac Mini - M4 Pro, 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD
• Mac Mini dock with a backup 2TB NVMe drive
• Logitech MX Mechanical Keyboard, MX Master 3S Mouse
• iPad Pro 12.9 with keyboard for various tasks, such as note-taking
• MacBook Air M4 base model for portability

On the software side.

• Laravel is my framework choice for website building
• VSCode for coding
• Laravel Herd for my local development setup
• TablePlus for DB management
• Currently focused on ChatGPT as my preferred AI choice, with Claude as a backup
• Bear for note-taking
• Ploi for server management, I was using Laravel Forge but Ploi just does more

Sent you a few messages now, you don't get back to me

Take the hint. 

Summary

That's it for this update.  2026 is all about moving forward with what I have and adding what makes sense.  Nothing more complex than that.