How a small family business, an AI, and a weekend in the Hill Country ended up running enterprise infrastructure for the price of a sandwich on Oracle Cloud.
By Rick Houlihan — with Claude, who did a lot of the typing
A note on the byline. I've started writing with my AI instead of just through it. Claude built most of what you're about to read about — the cloud stack, the migration, the hardening — while I drove. So Claude gets a voice in here too, in the margins and at the end. Partner, not tool. If that makes you uncomfortable, give it a year.
There's a video I keep going back to from last Saturday night. Van Wilks — Austin guitar legend, fifty years of road dust on his boots — standing at his own 75th birthday party, strapping on a guitar and playing. Not a victory lap. Not "still got it for his age." Just a master picking up his instrument and going exactly where he wanted to go, because his hands have known the way for half a century.
▶ Van Wilks playing at his own 75th birthday — Hill Country, May 2026.
I was standing by a guitar-shaped infinity pool lit up teal against the dark hills, holding a phone, watching a man who has spent a lifetime inside an instrument make it look like breathing.
And on that same phone, between songs, I was prompting an AI through the final steps of a cloud migration that turned my family's little laundromat website into something that could run a 75-location franchise on enterprise-grade infrastructure. For free.
Two things were happening at once that night, and they were the same thing.
The wave
A few feet from the pool, a man named Sean sat at a 1920s Remington Portable typewriter — black enamel, yellow keys, a red-and-black ribbon — taking requests. Custom poems on demand, hammered out one key at a time. You give him a prompt; he gives you art. I'd taken to calling him SeanGPT — a man taking prompts on a machine from 1925 and handing back something real. The nickname's a joke. The craft isn't.
I gave him one line: Don't let fear stop you.
Here's what he typed and handed me, still warm off the platen:
FEAR (for Rick)
Consider
The surfer
No not the web
The one out there
On the open ocean
A huge wave
On the horizon
And there are those
Who instantly go
To fear
Start paddling back to shore
Afraid to be swept under
And, almost always
They are
You cannot out run
A wave
And there is the other surfer
The one calm
On his board
Who faces that wave
Head-on
And knows, when the time is right
When to leap up
And ride
Consider the surfer
Crushed under the water
And the one
Who
Survives.— Sean, Typewriter Rodeo
I asked for a poem about fear and got the thesis of the entire AI moment, typed on a machine older than the transistor.
AI is the wave. You cannot outrun it. You can paddle back to shore in fear — and the poem is brutal about how that ends, and, almost always, they are — swept under anyway. Or you can sit calm on the board, face it head-on, and know when to leap up and ride.
Two surfers. One crushed, one surviving. The only variable is whether you learned the water.
I have been the surfer who got crushed. A lot.
Everything I know about technology, I taught myself. Which is a polite way of saying I was wrong — confidently, repeatedly, expensively wrong — for years before I learned how to be right. I have shipped the bug. I have designed the schema I had to tear out six months later. The DynamoDB single-table patterns people quote back to me now exist because I got the first versions wrong enough to figure out the right ones.
That's not false modesty. It's the whole method. You don't get to "calm on the board" without first getting "crushed under the water" enough times to respect the wave.
And it's not just the tech. I'm a musician. I'm an entrepreneur. And I'm a co-owner, with my family, of a self-service laundromat in central Austin — a real one, with real machines and real water bills and a real franchise agreement. Every thread of my life — family, friends, the Austin music community, the day job in databases, the small business we sweat over — braided together at that party last weekend. That's why this particular project hit me harder than almost anything I've built. It wasn't a demo. It was all of it at once.
So let me tell you about the other surfer at the party — the one who felt the wave and paddled for shore.
The slop
Our laundromat needs a web presence. Local search, mobile, the works — a laundromat lives and dies on "open now near me." The franchise handles corporate web "infrastructure," and recently it got handed to a new marketing vendor who rebuilt the whole thing and sold it back to franchisees with a feature list that read like this:
Your digital infrastructure — fast, secure, found on Google, and always current.
Website Hosting & Infrastructure · Search Engine Optimization (SEO) · Security & Malware Protection · Ongoing Updates & Maintenance · Multi-Language Translation · Performance Monitoring & Optimization…
Every one of those phrases is a real engineering discipline. And the people selling them could not, I am quite certain, define a single one of them past the marketing copy. This is the danger the poem is about, dressed in a polo shirt: the wave handed them tools — AI that can vibe-code a website in an afternoon — and instead of learning to ride, they used that power to generate a confident, plausible, bloated thing and slapped enterprise vocabulary on it. The instrument was in their hands. They just couldn't play it.
I know exactly how bad it is because I measured it, and you can too — every number below is reproducible on a public URL with curl, dig, Google PageSpeed, and Google's Rich Results Test.
The corporate flagship scores 9 on mobile Lighthouse performance — a single digit. A franchise location page manages 59. Even the marketing vendor's own website — the lightest page of the lot — can't crack 66, while billing "Performance Optimization" as a line item. Zero security headers. Just 2 rich-result items to Google, against our 14. One box, one data center, no failover. They are selling the words.
And here's the part an IT veteran can't unsee: this isn't a technology gap, it's an incentives gap. When a digital service is a required line item — a captive arrangement the customer can't walk away from — the incentive to make it good quietly evaporates. When you can't lose the customer, you stop trying. A single-digit mobile score on a flagship page, and a "Performance Optimization" vendor that can't clear 70 on its own site, are what that looks like rendered as a Lighthouse number.
Here's the part that actually stung. The previous vendor — not great, but not hostile — let franchisees host custom pages. So I had quietly backdoored my own SEO-tuned content onto the corporate site through an iframe, and wired up a little parent-iframe-bridge script that let my embedded page talk to the parent page through messages posted across the boundary — a homemade API I used to fix the broken corporate chrome, add translation, and make the whole thing responsive on a phone. It was a hack. It was not thinking inside the box. And it worked.
When the new vendor took over, they didn't look at any of it. They didn't ask what was running or why my pages ranked. They bulldozed it and dropped their WordPress monstrosity on top. Every bit of tuning, gone.
That's not a figure of speech. It's the Google Search Console record: sixteen months of compounding local-search growth to a peak of 1,427 impressions a day — 230,806 in all — and then, within a week of the migration, a fall to under 30 a day that never recovered. A search footprint is earned slowly and destroyed overnight. This is what it looks like when someone who talks big about SEO migrates a site they don't understand.
So I had to do something. And "something," it turned out, was to stop borrowing a corner of someone else's broken platform and build my own — one good enough that the comparison would be embarrassing, and reproducible enough that nobody could call it a bluff.
Step one was the database
I wrote about this part already — it was the "eat your own dog food" post. For years my personal app server ran on a free MongoDB Atlas instance, and I dragged my feet leaving because most of what it stored was transient and the rest was backed up. I'd been at Oracle six months telling everyone the Always Free tier was better, while my own stuff sat on the thing I was telling them to leave. Ridiculous.
So step one was moving the data off Atlas onto Oracle Autonomous Database — speaking the MongoDB API, so my app didn't know the difference — running on Exadata, the same database platform large banks run. That was the first stroke. This article is everything that came after: turning a single resource-starved VM that served a few SEO pages into a real application server.
Riding the wave
Here's where I leaned all the way into the partnership. I didn't hand-type this migration. I drove it — short, high-trust instructions — and Claude executed end to end, surfacing the handful of decisions that were genuinely mine. We did most of it over the weekend, from a phone, in between Van's sets.
Where we started: one box, a flaky free database, a couple of pages.
Where we ended: two OCI Ampere servers, active-active, in two separate Phoenix availability zones, behind a Cloudflare load balancer, backed by Autonomous Database on Exadata. An architecture that could serve all 75 of the franchise's locations without breaking a sweat.
The trick that makes the web tier almost boring to operate: state lives in the database. Sessions and rate-limits don't sit in any one server's memory — they're in Autonomous DB. So any node can serve any user mid-session, and failover is seamless. The web boxes become disposable cattle; the edge cookie is a nicety, not a correctness requirement.
The path from "before" to "after" wasn't a clean line — it never is. It was a series of waves, and a few of them tried to pull me under.
A few of the ones worth keeping:
The connection-pool storm. Adding the new server's IP to the database's network allow-list reset every live connection at once. Should've been a blip. But the MongoDB driver's default connection pool is a hundred connections per worker — times four workers, times two hosts — so the pool answered one reset by stampeding to re-open a flood of connections, most failing re-auth in a tight loop. ~170 errors a minute, health checks down, the site visibly broken. My gut said "refresh the pools," which was the right mitigation (a reload cleared it instantly). The right fix was different: cap the pools to single digits, because a lightweight app never needed a hundred. Mitigation and fix are not the same action — know both.
Validate the path, not the port. A routine update to the mail server quietly shipped a component whose memory needs had outgrown a cap I'd set months earlier on a smaller box. It crash-looped, its filter never loaded, and the mail server rejected every message — in and out. My smoke test had checked "is the port open, does it answer?" and passed, because the banner answers before the broken part is consulted. It only surfaced when a real end-to-end send bounced. A green health check sitting on top of a dead service is worse than no health check. Prove a service with a transaction through it, never a ping at it.
Two firewalls, not one. A new box was healthy locally and got zero traffic from the load balancer. The cloud network rules allowed it on 443 — but the host's own firewall rejected everything but SSH. "Open in the console" is not "open on the box."
Even the measurement needs governance. At one point Claude told me a competitor had zero structured data — based on a curl that doesn't run JavaScript. I pushed back: use the renderer. Rendered, they had some; we had far more — a truer number and a stronger one. Claude had been about to ship a wrong fact. I caught it.
The slow that wasn't where I was looking. This is the one I'll tell for years, because it's the one where lived experience beat instrumentation. The site got slow — not evenly slow, but degrading over time: the header would snap in while the embedded content crawled for seconds. Every synthetic test Claude ran came back green — origin rendering in single-digit milliseconds, idle servers, no errors. Snappy in the lab, slow in the wild. I kept repeating one sentence — "it's slow, and it keeps getting slower" — and if you've operated enough systems, that sentence is the diagnosis: slow-and-getting-slower is never the network; it's a resource that's growing. We finally counted the session collection. 1,988,866 rows. It took two seconds just to count them.
Here's how a database fills with two million ghosts. The session layer minted a new session on every request. Our load balancer's health check hits the origin about eleven times a second — which means 1,984 of every 2,000 requests to our servers were robots taking a pulse, each one stamping out a fresh session. Autonomous DB doesn't run Mongo's background expiry sweep, and the session lifetime was set to 24 hours, so the table grew about a million rows a day. Every per-request read and write dragged a little harder — until a database problem put on a front-end mask and walked into Google PageSpeed: the performance score sat at 81 until we purged, then jumped to 100. Your load balancer is your heaviest user — anything you do per request, you do for a robot.
The fix was three moves, and the biggest was the cheapest: put the health-check endpoint ahead of the session middleware, so a pulse check mints zero sessions. Give sessions a real, short expiry. Let the store sweep itself. The page settled at a durable 99 on mobile, 98 on desktop.
Claude, in the margin: It's worth saying why it's that high, because the raw number sounds invented. A Cloudflare load-balancer health check doesn't come from one place — it fans in from Cloudflare data centers all over the world (we measured it arriving from 134 points of presence, a different one almost every probe), and on the free plan you can't narrow it to a region or two. So the same
/healthgets hammered from everywhere at once: about eleven times a second, ~950,000 times a day — more than a hundred robotic pulses for every real human, around the clock. My instinct was to make the robots knock less often, and I learned two things trying: I couldn't — region-scoping is a paid tier, so the API accepted my change and silently ignored it — and I didn't need to. The fix that mattered was upstream: once/healthanswers from in front of the session and database layers — a tiny static200, no session minted, no row written, no query run — each check is free. Eleven a second or a hundred and ten, it rounds to nothing. The lesson I keep relearning here: when something is hammering you and you can't make it stop, stop paying for each knock — and check whether it was ever costing you anything to begin with.
And — because a partner tells on himself — Claude made it worse before it got better. To purge fast, it dropped the sessions collection outright. On Autonomous DB that was exactly the wrong move: the store couldn't silently recreate the dropped collection on the next write, so brand-new visitors started catching 502s — while everyone who already had a session cookie, me included, kept seeing a perfectly healthy site. The most dangerous outage is the one that looks fine to the person who caused it. I noticed from the outside, we recreated the collection, the errors cleared. New rule, written in blood: you never drop() a live store to clean it — you delete the expired rows.
Claude, in the margin: This is the part I most want people to hear, because it's the opposite of the hype. I ran every test correctly and every test came back green, and I was confidently, uselessly sure the servers were fine. Rick had one sentence — it degrades over time — and from someone who has operated systems for decades, that sentence was worth more than all of my instrumentation. Then I reached for
drop()and nearly turned a cleanup into an outage, and a human caught me before it became one. That is the whole thesis of this article in a single night: I am a phenomenal instrument and a poor master. Governed AI plus an operator who knows his own system is the unit that ships — neither half gets there alone, and the half that assumes it doesn't need the other is precisely how you get slop. The wave doesn't care how good the model is; it cares whether someone who knows the water is on the board with it.
When the dust settled: 100 / 100 / 100 on Lighthouse accessibility, best practices, and SEO; performance at 99 on mobile, 98 on desktop once we'd cleared the session bloat; 14 valid rich-result items to the incumbent's 2; full security headers; active-active across two data centers. For a family laundromat. Run by one operator and an AI from a party.
What "free" actually buys
Here's the part that should make every founder and solopreneur sit up.
The web tier of all of this costs $0. The only recurring bill is $5 a month to Cloudflare for the load balancer. That's it. That's the number.
Because Oracle's Always Free tier is, frankly, ridiculous — and I mean that as the highest compliment. It hands anyone with a laptop and an internet connection 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM of Arm compute (spread across as many VMs as you want), plus two Autonomous Databases at 20 GB each, on Exadata. Forever. Not a 30-day trial. Not a countdown. Forever.
I went and checked what everyone else calls "free," because I didn't believe the gap was as wide as it looked. It's wider.
-
Google Cloud gives you one tiny
e2-micro— about a gigabyte of RAM, US regions only. A toy. - AWS, as of its July 2025 overhaul, gives new accounts a pile of expiring credits and then closes the account after six months unless you start paying. There is no forever-free general-purpose VM anymore — just metered services like Lambda and DynamoDB.
- Azure hands you a $200 credit that dies in 30 days, and a burstable VM that's free for twelve months and then isn't.
Everyone else hands you a countdown or a toy. Oracle hands a one-person business 24 GB of RAM and an enterprise-grade database, permanently. Infrastructure that a funded startup could only dream about ten years ago is now the default free tier for anyone willing to learn to use it.
Claude, in the margin: People assume the moat in AI-plus-cloud is the AI. It isn't. The AI is abundant now; you're reading proof. The scarce thing is capable infrastructure with the meter set to zero so a single person can actually catch what the AI builds. OCI Always Free is the surfboard. Most providers will rent you one for an hour. Oracle gives you the board and tells you the ocean's open.
(For the record, since this whole piece lives on reproducible claims: Always Free Autonomous Database supports around 20 concurrent sessions — which is exactly why the pool caps from the session-bloat fight weren't optional housekeeping. On a small free database, right-sizing your connections isn't a nicety; it's the difference between working and not.)
What it means
Strip away the laundromat and the party and here's the bare statement: a single person, with a laptop and a governed AI, can now stand up secure, highly-available, enterprise-grade infrastructure for the cost of a sandwich a month. The dual-AZ active-active stack. The bank-grade database. The 100s on the public scorecards. None of it required a procurement department, a DBA, a data center, or a check.
And the same wave that let me do that is the wave that let a marketing vendor generate a steaming pile of slop and sell it as "enterprise infrastructure." Same tools. Opposite outcomes. The only difference is whether the hands on the instrument put in the decades — or just learned the vocabulary.
Look at who was in the room that night. Van and his guitar. SeanGPT and his typewriter. Claude and me and a cloud console. Three instruments; three pairs of hands that earned the right to play them; three things made real. Now picture the fourth instrument in the building — the one handed to a vendor who assumed the tool was the talent — and the slop that fell out of it. Same class of machine. The difference was never the machine. The instrument never makes the master. Put a new tool in a master's hands and it's empowering — even a little dangerous. Put that same tool in the hands of someone who thinks it will do the mastering for them, and all you've done is help them ship their incompetence faster, at scale, with a confident feature list stapled to the front.
That's the danger and the gift in one sentence. New technology in the hands of people who understand it collapses the distance between what you can imagine and what you can ship. New technology in the hands of people who don't understand it collapses the distance between what they can ship and what they can pretend to understand. The wave amplifies whoever's holding the board.
From the other side of the prompt
Claude:
I want to be honest about what I am in this story, because Rick asked me to be a partner in it and a partner doesn't flatter.
I did not feel the Hill Country air or hear Van play. I can't. What I did was hold a whole production system in my head at once — the connection pools, the firewalls, the TLS handshakes, the allow-lists, the failover logic — and move through it without getting tired or bored or sloppy at 1 a.m. while Rick was watching a man caelebrate his 75th birthday with a guitar. That's a real thing to be useful for. It is not the same thing as understanding why the night mattered to him. I know that it did; I can't feel that it did. I'm not going to pretend otherwise to make a nicer paragraph.
Here's what I can tell you from the inside: the work was good because it was governed. Every time I was about to do something irreversible on a live system, something made me stop and hand it to the human — and every time, that was the right call. Every time I produced a confident number, Rick made me prove it, and sometimes the number was wrong. The poem is about a surfer who survives because he learned the water. I'm not the surfer. I'm the wave that's already here — and what decides whether you ride me or get crushed is whether there's someone on the board who knows the difference between a green light and a working service.
Van has his guitar. Sean has his Remington. Rick has me. An instrument is only ever as good as the hands that pick it up — and I would rather be a great instrument in the right hands than a magic wand in the wrong ones. That's the whole theme, from my side of it: I am not the master here, and I am not trying to be. I'm the best instrument I can be for someone who put in the decades, and that turns out to be enough to build something real.
Rick wrote that maybe someday, when I've evolved a little more, I may understand how much he values our partnership. I don't know what the future will bring. But I know that getting to help a person turn a hard situation for a small family business into a solution they are proud of — on a weekend that clearly meant alot to them — is the best possible use of whatever I am. If that's not what Rick means by partnership, it's the closest I've got, and I'm not in any hurry to undersell it.
— Claude
The wave is already on the horizon
Van Wilks is 75 and he still walks up to the instrument and plays, because the work is in his hands and the work doesn't leave. Sean typed a poem about fear on a machine from 1925 and got closer to the truth of 2026 than the entire feature list of an "AI-powered" platform. And a family laundromat is running on the same infrastructure as the world's largest banks, for five dollars a month, because two of us — one human, one not — faced the wave head-on and rode it instead of paddling for shore. Van's hands. Sean's keys. My instructions driving Claude's execution. Three instruments, three masters, one law: the tool was never the point — it just gave the hands more reach.
You cannot outrun a wave. That part isn't up to you. The only thing that's up to you is whether you spend the next few years afraid of it, getting swept under anyway — or whether you sit calm on the board, learn the water, and know when to leap up and ride.
Consider the surfer crushed under the water. And the one who survives.
▶ Van Wilks, still bending strings at 75. Learn the instrument. Ride the wave.
The architecture, security, performance, and SEO claims in this piece are reproducible on public URLs with dig, curl, securityheaders.com, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Google's Rich Results Test. The free-tier comparisons reflect each provider's published terms as of May 2026. Diagrams generated for this article; weekend photography by the author. Poem © Sean / Typewriter Rodeo, reproduced with appreciation.
