A few weeks ago I bought a domain on a whim: fasterthantheinternet.com. I didn't have a plan — just a vague idea that a site with that name should be fast, useful, and have zero nonsense on it. A weekend later it had 15 tools, an admin dashboard, and was deployed. Here's how it went.

The concept

The pitch is simple: developer utilities that run in your browser, no account required, no cookie banners, no paste-blockers. The kind of tools you Google every couple of weeks and then forget the URL for — Base64, JSON formatter, regex tester, DNS lookup, WHOIS, that sort of thing. There are a hundred sites that do this already. Most of them are slow, plastered in ads, or broken on mobile. I figured there was room for one more that was actually pleasant to use.

The stack

Plain PHP 8, vanilla JavaScript, custom CSS. No framework, no build step. Files are served directly — you can develop with php -S localhost:8000 and deploy by rsyncing a folder. That's it.

The design system is built entirely on CSS custom properties: four category accent colours (cyan for Network, violet for Encode/Decode, amber for Generate, rose for Dev Tools), a dark surface scale, and three text levels. Everything from card hover glows to tool page focus rings derives from those tokens. I used Syne for display headings, Outfit for body text, and IBM Plex Mono for anything that should look like a terminal.

One decision I'd repeat: the CSS reset and design tokens live in main.css, tool-page-specific styles in css/pages/tools.css, and admin styles in their own file. The shared includes/header.inc.php wires everything together based on a $toolCat variable set at the top of each page. Simple, but it meant I could build 15 tool pages without copy-pasting a single layout.

The tools

Fifteen tools across four categories. Almost all of them run entirely client-side — the JavaScript does the work, nothing leaves your browser:

  • Network: DNS Lookup (Google DNS JSON API), What's My IP (ipapi.co), HTTP Headers (PHP cURL proxy), WHOIS (rdap.org)
  • Generate: Password Generator (crypto-random), UUID Generator (crypto.randomUUID)
  • Encode/Decode: Base64, URL Encoder, JSON Formatter, JWT Decoder
  • Dev Tools: Regex Tester, Unix Timestamp Converter, Cron Parser, Color Converter, Text Diff

The four network tools need to make outbound requests, so they use either a public JSON API (DNS, IP) or a lightweight PHP cURL proxy (HTTP Headers). The proxy has SSRF protection — it blocks requests to private IP ranges so nobody can use it to poke at internal infrastructure.

A few tools I'm particularly happy with: the Cron Parser translates expressions like 0 9 * * 1-5 into plain English ("At 9am, Monday through Friday") and shows the next 8 scheduled run times with relative countdowns. The Text Diff uses a proper LCS algorithm — the same underlying approach as git diff — rather than just highlighting lines that changed. And the JWT Decoder decodes automatically on paste and shows a live expiry status so you can tell at a glance whether a token is still valid.

Analytics without cookies

I wanted to know which tools were actually being used, but I didn't want to drop cookies, load Google Analytics, or deal with a GDPR banner. The solution: a small PHP tracker that runs on every page load, anonymises the visitor's IP with a SHA-256 hash (plus a server-side salt), and writes a row to a MySQL table. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no third-party requests. The data is only useful in aggregate — which is exactly all I need.

The admin dashboard (password-protected, not linked anywhere public) shows a 30-day traffic chart, tool usage bars, recent visits, and top referrers. Nothing fancy — Chart.js for the chart, a handful of SQL queries for everything else.

Performance

During the build I had Tailwind CSS loaded via CDN — a ~350KB JavaScript bundle that scans the DOM and generates CSS on the fly. Useful while prototyping. When I audited the classes actually in use at the end, the answer was: none. The entire design was custom CSS from the start. Removing that one script tag was the single biggest performance improvement of the whole project.

The OG image is generated by PHP's GD library using local TTF font files. It caches to a PNG for a week. That means social previews look right without needing an external image service or a headless browser.

What's next

I'm letting it run for a couple of weeks before deciding what to add. The analytics will show which categories are popular and whether anyone is actually using the more niche tools (cron parser, text diff). Based on that I'll either add more tools in the same vein or fill gaps in the existing categories. A few candidates: IP subnet calculator, Markdown previewer, number base converter, HTML entity encoder.

Carbon Ads is set up and waiting for approval — a single unobtrusive ad slot at the bottom of each tool page, styled to match the dark theme. The site's goal was always to be self-sustaining rather than profitable, so even modest ad revenue would be a win.

The source isn't public, but if you want to see what it looks like: fasterthantheinternet.com.