A tiny patch of the internet, with an expiry date.

Not every idea needs a permanent home

Most hosting products are built around the assumption that a project should grow: more traffic, more storage, more services, a permanent archive. That is the right shape for a business. It is often the wrong shape for a sketch.

A portfolio draft, a workshop demo, a prototype API or a page you want to show someone before Monday does not necessarily need a permanent domain, a recurring bill and a deployment pipeline. It needs a URL, a place to put the files and a sensible point at which it stops being your problem.

Mayfly is built for that in-between moment. You get a small box on a real machine, a public address and a hard limit of 24 hours. When the limit arrives, the process stops and the files are removed. There is no renewal button and no archive. The constraint is the product.

How a box actually works

Static boxes are plain folders served through this site at a stable address such as /s/weekend-notes/. Nothing is executed. HTML, CSS, JavaScript and assets are delivered with a sandboxed content security policy, so a user page cannot read the control panel or its cookies.

Runtime boxes are different. A Python box starts python -u main.py; a Node box starts node index.js. The process receives five random localhost ports, and Mayfly provisions a temporary Cloudflare tunnel to the primary one. There is nothing for you to install on your own computer or phone. The tunnel closes when the box stops or expires.

The stable public address lives on Cloudflare Pages. A Pages Function forwards panel and box requests to the laptop through an outbound Cloudflare tunnel. The laptop does not open an inbound port, and its occasional tunnel rotations do not change the public site address.

Each runtime box is capped at 512 MB of memory. A watchdog samples the process tree and stops a box that goes over the limit. Accounts also have a disk allowance per box. Runtime code runs inside a per-box sandbox limited to its own folder, its Node or Python tooling and outbound internet; host files and the local network are blocked. If the host cannot start the sandbox helper, the box page shows an explicit warning instead of hiding the risk.

The principles behind the limits

• Small over scalable. The host is a single machine with a small CPU and 4 GB of RAM. Saying yes to that constraint makes the product clearer, not weaker.
• Expiration over accumulation. Every box has a deadline. Nothing is kept “just in case”, and no abandoned test app becomes permanent infrastructure.
• Honest limits over imaginary guarantees. There is no SLA, no backup and no promise that the laptop will never sleep. The public pages say so instead of hiding it in a footnote.
• Approval over open registration. The operator reviews every request because the machine is shared. This keeps the crowd small enough for one person to run responsibly.
• Public by default. A published box is visible on the internet unless the app itself adds authentication. Mayfly does not pretend to be a private vault.

Who runs Mayfly

Mayfly is run by a private individual as a small experimental service, not by a company. The operator handles access requests, allocates limits, watches the host and answers abuse or privacy questions by hand. There is no support team, sales team or ticketing system behind this page.

That also means the service can change or pause when the machine needs attention. If the laptop goes offline, the public reading pages remain available through Cloudflare, while the dashboard and boxes wait for it to return. If the service is no longer available, it will not take a year of billing statements to figure it out: there are no fees and no contracts.

To ask for access or get in touch, use the contact page. To understand the technical shape of the service before you apply, read the field notes.

What Mayfly is not

• It is not production hosting for a business or a critical application.
• It is not a private file store, a secret manager or a durable backup.
• It is not a VM or container service. Runtime code is confined to a lightweight per-box sandbox with outbound internet, but that is a mitigation, not a guarantee.
• It is not a custom-domain or long-term website product.
• It is not a place for illegal, deceptive or abusive content.

If you need any of those things, Mayfly is the wrong tool. If you need a public corner for something small, temporary and made by hand, it might be exactly right.