AI forced Hiatus

We used to have basic web servers available at work for student projects which provided me with a way of setting up a basic web pages for free! As well as a page full of links to the various applications I use at work (a super simple bookmark page), I used it to host mini projects like search widgets, book title carousel, graphs/reports, Twine projects, a comic strip using stock photos (I was testing the comic strip code functionality), etc. Whatever random stuff I was working on/learning about that required basic web hosting. It offered a really simple file management interface, I could setup a simple password to ensure all the links were not being crawled, a super simple web playground, it was awesome! But our IT division decided to shut it all down. We had prior warning and an opportunity to download all our files so not a massive imposition and they had an alternative. It appears as though the management of this alternative option was handed over to the learning technologies department though as it tends to go down inbetween sessions - not the sites themselves but the file management options, so I am left unable to make any changes until it gets spun up during session time. This makes sense as its primarily aimed at students doing assessment tasks but I know there were a number of academics that used to create professional pages to promote themselves and their publications (equivalent to LinkedIn but a free 'site of one's own').

This is a long story to provide context but since the new 'work' solution doesn't really work for me, I went looking for alternatives.

This site uses 11ty, Github and Netlify but the ability to add password protection was problematic - Its not like I want to host sensitive and/or personal information or anything that requires super strength authentication, I just wanted some sort of way to block bots and create a bit more of a private 'play' space - work in progress type stuff. Some searching provided assistance in the form of Netlify Edge functions. The complexity is a bit over my head to be honest so Netlify kindly recommended using their AI tool to implement a simple password protection onto all pages on my proposed site (not this one obviously). It generated the code and got me to review it before creating a branch which I had the option of merging later which was cool. I am not a programmer but all the code was straight forward and I took the time to review all the functions and tasks it was performing so I don't feel like I was completely vibe coding but it certainly saved me having to copy and tweak code from documentation. Bit less learning but much more speed! This is where I ran into a bit of a problem though...
Use of the AI tools requires credits - apparently my plan didn't contain enough credits to cover all the work so suddenly my Netlify sites are blocked until the following billing period (i.e. a whole month!).

Not the end of the world but I have to say - a heads up before blocking everything would have been helpful!

Access has been restored - I have been able to test the password functionality (finally) and it all works great. I just have to figure out how to migrate everything over to the new structure so I am looking forward to that tinkering. I also have to remember everything I was going to post about in the time that I was blocked. So many times over the past month I caught myself thinking - I will add that to my site but then there was the 'oh yeah, I can't yet'. It has got me wondering whether I should just move to hosting through a commercial provider or something? Given my 'learning' experience I think I should be able to operate without shooting myself in the foot again but I might keep a lookout for alternatives all the same.