Keeping Website Form Submissions on the Site: A File-Backed Ticket Board for Small-Business Websites

Small-business websites usually deliver contact-form submissions by email, which leaves enquiries, order problems and sign-ups without a status, an owner or a history, and exposes them to spam filtering. This note describes a minimal alternative used in a family of website templates built with Astro, React and Tailwind CSS. Each form posts to a validated, rate-limited endpoint on the site's own server, which records the submission as a numbered ticket in a single JSON file. A password-protected admin board on the same site lists the tickets live over Server-Sent Events and moves them through four statuses, while the public pages remain prerendered. The note covers the intake path, the storage design (serialized writes, atomic replacement, bounded retention), authentication and the live-update protocol. It closes with the trade-offs: the design needs one long-running process with a persistent disk, and serverless hosts require swapping the storage module for a database.