About dislike404.com

How it started

The idea came up while building a WordPress website for my wife. Once the site grew past a handful of pages, keeping track of broken links and 404 errors manually just wasn't realistic anymore. There are WordPress plugins for that - but none of them really convinced me. Either too bloated, too limited, or yet another upsell. The obvious next stop was Google Search Console - but honestly, it's not great for this either. By the time it flags an error, Google has already crawled it, your visitors have already seen it, and the link might have been broken for weeks. It's a useful tool, but it's reactive by nature. I wanted something proactive.

So I started looking for a service that would automatically scan my website and notify me the moment something went wrong. Preferably for free. Turns out, that's a short list. Everything halfway decent is behind a paywall - often very early. Free tiers that are barely usable, and then a monthly fee before you've even gotten started.

So I thought: I'm an IT engineer, I've built websites before - this can't be that complicated, right? Right???!

Famous last words

Pretty complicated, as it turns out. Somewhere between "IT engineer" and "web developer" lies a large gap - and don't even get me started on design. On top of that, I hadn't built anything serious in about 20 years. The web looked very different back then, and a lot has changed. But that's also what made it fun.

And honestly? I just wanted a project again. Something to work on in my spare time, something to actually finish and put out into the world.

Why it's free

I just find it annoying how hard it is to find a free service these days. Everything has a catch. Years ago I ran dhost.info, a free web hosting service - so the idea of building something and just putting it out there isn't exactly new to me.

dislike404.com is free. No paywalls, no hidden limits, no "free trial" that expires after 14 days. Just a tool that works.

The Tech Stack

dislike404.com runs on a dedicated server at Hetzner. I considered cloud providers, but honestly - self-hosting just felt more familiar and gave me full control over everything.

The web application is built with Laravel, Livewire and TailwindCSS. After a bit of research it just felt like the right combination - a solid, well-documented framework that doesn't get in your way.

The crawler itself is written in Java, which is the language I'm most comfortable with from my day job. It made sense to use something I actually know rather than learning everything from scratch at once.

And with Cloudflare in front of everything - the site is fast. Really fast.

And of course - I have to be honest - both ChatGPT and Claude.ai helped along the way. Building something like this solo nowadays without AI assistance would have taken much longer. 😄

What's next

dislike404.com is still a work in progress. A few things are already on my list: the URL blacklist works, but the interface is a bit clunky and needs some work. The results view could also show more details and be better organized overall. And I'm planning a WordPress plugin - so if you're running WordPress, stay tuned.