I need to tell you about something that happened at 2:30 AM last Thursday. I was doing what every responsible infrastructure engineer does at 2:30 AM — lying ...
I got a Slack message at 6:14 AM on Friday from Tom, our sysadmin. Just a link to an INTERPOL press release and the words "we should probably check our stuff." ...
A Fedora Linux developer named Marcin Juszkiewicz published a blog post yesterday with the kind of title that makes server hardware enthusiasts either nod knowi...
I have been managing servers for about nine years now, and in that time I have watched smart people waste extraordinary amounts of money on performance optimiza...
I have been a DigitalOcean loyalist for six years. My first ever VPS was a $5 DO droplet running a terrible WordPress blog about guitar pedals (do not look for ...
Every time I recommend shared hosting in a tech forum, someone shows up to tell me I am an idiot. "Just get a $5 VPS," they say, like managing a Linux server is...
November 29, 2024. Black Friday. The biggest sales day of the year. And my client's e-commerce site was dead. Not "slow." Not "glitchy." Dead. 502 Bad Gateway....
I'm going to say something that will make half the DevOps community angry: most startups should not be using Kubernetes. There. I said it. And before you close...
I lost everything on a Tuesday. Not dramatically — no fire, no flood, no Hollywood-worthy catastrophe. Just a database migration that went wrong at 2 AM, a r...
Last November, our main client's website crashed during Black Friday. Not a little hiccup — a full-blown, 502-error, customers-screaming-on-Twitter meltdown. ...
My first e-commerce store crashed on Black Friday 2023. Not "ran a bit slow" crashed — full-on 503 error, cart abandoned, $12,000 in estimated lost sales, cra...
My neighbor asked me to help her set up a website for her bakery last month. She's 54, uses her computer mostly for email and Facebook, and the phrase "cPanel" ...
Three AM on a Saturday. My phone buzzes. It's the CEO of a client I manage infrastructure for: "Site's down. Customers are furious. Fix it." Turns out, their sh...
When my startup hit 50,000 monthly active users last summer, our $40/month VPS started choking. Page loads crept up to 4 seconds. Error rates spiked. I knew it ...
Three AM on a Saturday. My phone buzzes. It's an uptime alert — my client's e-commerce store just went down during a flash sale. 2,300 people trying to buy di...
Three years ago, I launched a WordPress blog on Bluehost because every "how to start a blog" article on the internet told me to. It was fine — until it wasn't...
Two years ago, I moved seven websites to Hostinger on a dare. A developer friend bet me $50 that cheap hosting would come back to bite me within six months. I'm...