I’ve been using Replit since it was called Repl.it, when there where only a few languages supported, and every time you wanted to visit a website you had to wait 20 or so seconds in front of a “Waking up…” screen. That’s where I started one of my first “bigger” projects, a failed URL shortener that had its data hosted on MongoDB Atlas. It also hosted tens of my beginner Discord bots. It wasn’t much, but it was great. Open a browser, look up repl.it and then replit.com, click create, write some code and boom! Your website was online.

I recently tried to do that again and was very disappointed in seeing it is not possible anymore. I now apparently need to DEPLOY a project to get the subdomain?? And it COSTS MONEY??? I guess Replit has just become a full-on hosting service for “non-sysadmins”. I mean, that’s not bad at all, I noticed a whole lot of features that did not really exist when I used it and I’m sure they’re very easy and comfortable to use, but it just feels weird to know I now have to setup apache for 20 minutes on my VPS to create even the smallest of websites.

I guess that’s how it is now.