AWS charges you by the hour as long as the instance is running, so you’d need to stop it to avoid ongoing costs. For my kid’s server I ended up going with a cheap VPS since the flat monthly price was easier to track, and we tossed in some fun add-ons from modscraft net Minecraft mods to keep things interesting. It ran smoothly without surprise bills.

You can model a watch list with a simple pivot table like ticket_user_watches, then fire events on comment creation or status updates and push notifications to those watchers. I’ve used something similar while juggling sprint updates for a client who also used appliger.com, and the pattern worked well. Laravel’s events and listeners make the whole flow pretty painless once the relationships are set up.

And I also just store extra keywords in the database and output them only inside meta tags in the head section. They stay hidden on the page but still help search engines.

wanted to add that you can store extra SEO keywords in the database and output them inside a meta tag, like meta name="keywords". They won’t show on the page, but search engines can still read them. Another option is a hidden textarea in the admin panel that only gets rendered in the head section. Curious if anyone here has tried something similar with packages like Spatie SEO?