TL;DR / Summary: When a distro reaches end of life, a VPS does not stop working—it stops receiving security updates. Plan the rebuild as a migration with a parallel install,…
Read MoreRunning Self-Hosted Analytics on a VPS
TL;DR / Summary: A privacy-friendly analytics tool on a VPS needs almost no resources, but it does need a retention policy. Left alone, a visit table grows until the disk…
Read MoreWhen Port 25 Is Blocked: Configuring Postfix to Relay Through a Smarthost
Draining the stuck queue Messages already deferred are still addressed to their original MX on port 25, so Postfix will keep retrying them on the old path even after the…
Read MoreKeeping overlay2 Disk Usage Under Control Without Breaking Running Containers
Docker’s overlay2 driver keeps every image layer, every stopped container’s writable layer and every build cache on the same filesystem as /var/lib/docker. On a VPS with a 40 GB disk,…
Read MoreTune Fail2ban SSH Jails on a Fresh VPS
TL;DR / Summary: A new VPS attracts SSH scanners within minutes. Install Fail2ban, tune SSH jail thresholds for your real login habits, and whitelist your own IPs before you travel….
Read MoreRun Uptime Kuma on a Spare VPS Slice
TL;DR / Summary: External uptime checks catch outages your app server cannot report about itself. Install Uptime Kuma on a small secondary VPS slice, point monitors at public URLs, and…
Read MoreMGLRU on a Small VPS: Generational Page Reclaim Explained and Benchmarked
Multi-generational LRU, merged into the mainline kernel in 6.1, replaced a page-reclaim design that had gone largely unchanged since the early 2000s. The difference is architectural rather than incremental: instead…
Read Morezswap Compressed Swap on a VPS: zbud vs zstd and How to Measure It
Swap on a VPS has a bad reputation, and on spinning disks or network-attached storage that reputation is deserved. Compressed swap changes the arithmetic entirely: instead of writing evicted anonymous…
Read MoreRun Docker Compose on One VPS Without Sprawl
TL;DR / Summary: One VPS can run a small Docker Compose stack cleanly if you cap services, pin resources, and separate data from containers. Sprawl starts when every experiment becomes…
Read MoreChoosing a VPS Region for Latency-First Apps
TL;DR / Summary: Latency-first apps should pick a VPS region near real users, not near the logo of a famous city. Measure from the audiences you serve, weigh data-residency rules,…
Read More