Shared, VPS or dedicated - which one you need
Not a ladder you climb by size. Three different answers to three different questions, and most sites are on the wrong one for the wrong reason.
5 min read
A firewall that starts closed
Allow what you need and refuse the rest. The order of the commands matters, because one of them can lock you out.
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Reading load average
Three numbers that only mean something next to your core count - and what to look at when they are high.
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Logs that fill the disk
Rotation is configured per service, so a service added later has none. How to see which log is growing and set it up in one file.
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Changing Nginx config without taking the site down
Test, then reload. The difference between reload and restart is the difference between nobody noticing and everybody noticing.
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Why NVMe changes the answer
The difference is not the sequential speed on the datasheet. It is how many small operations happen at once, which is what a database does all day.
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The server is out of disk
Find what filled it in two commands, free space safely, and stop it happening again.
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Resizing a VPS without losing data
CPU and memory come back after a reboot. Disk needs two more steps, and the last one is the one people forget.
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Reverse DNS for a server that sends mail
The record that maps your IP back to a name. Without it large receivers refuse mail before it is even read.
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What to monitor, and at what level
Five signals worth an alert, the thresholds that give you time to act, and the rule that keeps alerts worth reading.
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Swap in use is a symptom, not a setting
Free memory near zero is normal and not a problem. Swap being written to is, and the two are easy to confuse.
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start, enable, and the difference
One starts a service now, the other starts it after a reboot. Confusing them is why a service is missing the morning after.
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A clock that is wrong breaks more than timestamps
TLS, tokens, cron and logs all depend on it. Three places set time and they do not have to agree.
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What 99.9% uptime actually allows
The number in minutes per month, what an SLA measures, and what it never covers.
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The first hour on a new VPS
Six things to do before the server carries anything, in the order that leaves no window where it is exposed.
7 min read
What a vCPU actually is
Shared, dedicated and burstable are three different products sold with the same word. What each means for a site that gets busy.
5 min read