I Bought Cheap Hosting Before I Had a Business Plan

Hostinger's $114.82 four-year hosting plan was purchased by a user without a business plan, leading to the creation of ChineseFortuneTools.com, a site offering Chinese cultural tools. The user, inspired by AI advice and the simplicity of wheelpage.com, built the site in two days to target English-speaking audiences with cleaner, mobile-friendly Chinese fortune tools. The project aims to attract search traffic and ad revenue with minimal maintenance.

The Hostinger deal was $114.82 for 4 years. My existing plan — the one I bought without thinking — is going to cost $263 to renew in 2 years. The math doesn’t care about feelings. So I bought it. New plan. Four years. Before I had a single idea of what to put on it. The Problem With Buying First My current Hostinger plan hosts three sites. I’m using all three slots. The new plan also supports three sites — and I had zero sites planned for it. That’s the moment most people would have buyer’s remorse. I had a different reaction: I opened a conversation with Claude and typed something like, “I just bought four years of hosting with no plan. What should I build?” What followed was one of those AI conversations I actually screenshot and save. The Research Rabbit Hole I wanted something low-maintenance. Not another blog. Not another site I had to update every week. Something that could sit there, get search traffic, maybe earn ad revenue, without me feeding it constantly. The AI pointed me toward tool sites. Sites like wheelpage.com https://wheelpage.com — a dead-simple random spin-the-wheel tool. No content calendar. No author bio. Just a useful utility that people search for, land on, use, and come back to. The general idea: SEO brings traffic, ads or a freemium tier convert it, and the tool keeps running whether you touch it or not. I had no proof this model would work for me specifically. I was simply curious whether a small, useful website could eventually attract enough visitors to make something — anything — back. I didn’t need a business case. I needed a direction. From Wheelpage to Chinese Fortune Tools The honest version of how this went: I thought about copying wheelpage. Just building a cleaner spin-the-wheel and targeting the same keywords. Then I thought: what do I actually know? What’s a space where I have some background, and where I’m not just competing against people who have been doing it for years? Chinese culture. Ba Zi. Zodiac. Feng Shui. Lunar calendar. I’m Chinese. These things aren’t exotic to me — they’re just the culture I grew up with. The zodiac was how my family talked about personalities. The lunar calendar marked every festival. Folk sayings were how older relatives gave advice. I had never thought of any of that as an asset. It was simply background noise from childhood. Then I looked at what actually existed in English for this space. Most of it looked like it was built in 2009 and hadn’t been touched since. Cluttered layouts, machine-translated text, tools that barely worked on mobile. I thought: I could probably make something cleaner than this. I didn’t have a validated opportunity. I had a vague feeling that I could do better, and some spare server space. Two days later, ChineseFortuneTools.com https://chinesefortunetools.com/ was live. The Part That Still Surprises Me Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. I had an idea for a card-based interface for Chinese wisdom — something where you scroll through one saying at a time, on your phone, the way you might scroll through short videos. Not because I wanted to build a dopamine product. Because I had a different problem in mind. Most Chinese proverb sites are databases. You search, you find a list, you scroll past fifty things you don’t need. That’s not how wisdom actually works. Wisdom is useful when it meets a specific moment. A couple is arguing. Someone sends them 退一步海阔天空 — “step back and the sea and sky open wide.” A friend is rushing a decision. You send them 欲速则不达 — “haste doesn’t get you there faster.” Someone takes a loss. They stumble on 塞翁失马 — the old man’s horse — and it reframes everything. Someone keeps getting too close too fast with people they barely know. They read 交浅不可言深 and suddenly understand something about themselves. That’s the product idea: one thought, one situation, one possible action. Discover it, understand it, save it, or send it to someone who needs it right now. Not a database. A moment of recognition. I described the interface to Claude: full-screen cards, swipe to move forward, image-forward, one saying per card. It built it. That’s the Chinese Wisdom card interface https://chinesefortunetools.com/chinese-wisdom/ — live, on mobile, built in an afternoon. A year ago I would have looked at something like that and assumed it took a real developer. Now I describe the idea and it exists. That’s the shift that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it. I’m not a better programmer than I was. I just have access to something that removes the gap between I have an idea and the idea exists . What This Is, Actually I don’t know whether ChineseFortuneTools will make money. I don’t know whether Google will send meaningful traffic to a brand-new site about Chinese culture. I don’t know whether people outside China will care about Ba Zi or lunar calendars or folk proverbs. These are real open questions, not false modesty. What I do know: the hosting cost less than a weekend trip. The domain was cheap. The tools exist because I had the time and the curiosity to build them. If the site eventually earns something, that’s a bonus. If it doesn’t, I spent a few months learning how to build something from nothing, in a space I actually know something about. That’s precisely why I’m doing it. Not because I have a plan. Because I don’t have one, and I want to find out what happens when you build anyway. The original plan for the new hosting was “I’ll figure it out.” Still figuring. Related: Building in Public — the weekly data log where I track all of this with real numbers.