Two VPS hosts can sell identical vCPU counts and differ by several percent on a latency-sensitive workload before you write a line of application code, because of how often the…
Read MoreWireGuard Hub Node on a Budget VPS
TL;DR / Summary: A small VPS makes an excellent WireGuard hub for laptops, phones, and a home lab that sit behind awkward NATs. Keep the hub thin—VPN and almost nothing…
Read MoreOvernight rsync Relay VPS for Laptop Backups
TL;DR / Summary: Laptops sleep, change networks, and miss backup windows. A cheap VPS can act as an overnight rsync relay: your machines push when awake, and the relay holds…
Read MorePHP-FPM Idle Timeouts and Slowlog: Backtracing the Request That Hangs
A request that hangs is harder to diagnose than one that crashes, because nothing in the error log fires. PHP-FPM leaves a worker sitting on a connection, the client waits,…
Read MoreJournald Storage Caps and Flush Rate During a Log Storm
When a service starts failing rapidly, the flood of log lines is the diagnostic evidence you need and simultaneously the thing that fills the disk. Journald has two separate mechanisms…
Read MoreDisk Full With Free Space: Fixing Inode Exhaustion
TL;DR / Summary: On ext4, a disk can have gigabytes free and still refuse to accept a single byte. The limit is inodes, the fixed-size records that track files. A…
Read MoreRunning a Community Radio Stream on a Small VPS
TL;DR / Summary: A community radio station needs very little compute and a predictable amount of bandwidth. Icecast on a modest VPS can serve dozens of listeners at 128 kbps,…
Read MoreDiagnosing VPS Time-to-First-Byte: A Layer-by-Layer Stack Walk
Time to first byte is the sum of every stage between a client’s SYN and the first byte of the response body. When TTFB rises from 80 ms to 900…
Read MoreCPU Credits and Burstable VPS Plans: Burst vs Sustained Load
Burstable VPS plans decouple the CPU you can consume for short periods from the CPU you pay for continuously. A plan advertised as “4 vCPU burstable” may guarantee only 20%…
Read MoreTuning the dmesg Ring Buffer on a VPS: Why Boot Logs Vanish
A fixed-size ring buffer silently drops the boot logs and OOM records you need most. Here is how to size log_buf_len, throttle printk, and persist captures.
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