All Guides
20 practical, hands-on guides for running your own servers — organized by category.
Switching providers doesn't have to mean an outage window. Here's the sequence that keeps a migration invisible to users.
Price-per-vCPU is the least useful number on a VPS pricing page. Here's what actually predicts whether you'll be happy with a provider a year from now.
Specs sheets look nearly identical across providers. Actually running production workloads on each tells a different story.
The exact sequence I follow every time I spin up a fresh VPS, from first SSH login to a live HTTPS site.
A status page turns 'is it just me?' support tickets into a five-second self-serve check. Here's how to run one yourself.
A managed image CDN is convenient, but a self-hosted one is cheaper at scale and gives you full control over caching and transforms.
Multi-tenant doesn't have to mean Kubernetes and per-customer clusters. Here's how it actually works on one server.
Most SaaS products don't outgrow a single well-tuned VPS for years. Here's how to architect one properly from day one.
Password-only access to your most sensitive server logins is one leaked credential away from a bad week. Here's how to add real 2FA.
Most VPS outages for small products trace back to one of a handful of avoidable mistakes. Here's the list, and the fix for each.
Not a theoretical security essay — the specific commands and settings I run on every server before it goes live.
Let's Encrypt certificates expire every 90 days. Here's how to make sure the renewal job doesn't quietly fail the one time it matters.
You don't need Jenkins or a platform team to stop deploying by hand. A GitHub Actions workflow and one SSH step covers most solo setups.
Docker isn't free — it costs you RAM, complexity, and debugging time. Here's when that trade is actually worth making solo.
One VPS, multiple apps, each on its own domain — here's the Nginx and PM2 configuration that makes it clean to maintain.
cPanel is the industry default, but its licensing costs add up fast on a solo project. Here's how aaPanel compares in practice.
Read replicas are one of the most reached-for scaling tools and one of the most commonly reached for too early. Here's the actual test.
There's a natural order to splitting infrastructure as you grow. Doing it out of order usually means solving a problem you don't have yet.
You don't need a $200/month observability platform to know when your server is on fire. Here's what actually covers the essentials for free or nearly free.
A backup you've never restored from isn't a backup — it's a hope. Here's a setup that's actually reliable.
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