Steal time is the one CPU metric on a VPS that describes something you cannot fix from inside the guest. It counts the cycles during which your vCPU was runnable…
Read MoreDiagnosing a Softirq Network Bottleneck on a Single-vCPU VPS
A single-vCPU VPS can be perfectly healthy by every CPU metric and still drop packets under load. The usual cause is that the receive path is processed by softirqs on…
Read Morenginx Upstream Handoff: Where TTFB Actually Goes
When TTFB is 900 ms and the application code has already been profiled, the remaining time is usually not in the application at all. It is in the handoff between…
Read MoreSupervising Python App Workers on a Linux VPS with Supervisor
A web application started with nohup python app.py & is not a service. It does not restart after a crash, it does not survive a reboot, it writes logs to…
Read MoreVPS vCPU and RAM Sizing for Small Business Sites and Side Projects
TL;DR / Summary: Start with one vCPU and 2 GB RAM for low-traffic WordPress or static stacks; scale when swap thrash or queue latency appears. Compare plans and specs on…
Read MoreSeven Signs Shared Hosting Outgrown and a VPS Upgrade Makes Sense
TL;DR / Summary: Shared hosting fails quietly through throttled cron, blocked ports, and noisy neighbors. If you hit two or more signs below, model VPS total cost—including your admin time—using…
Read Moreext4 vs XFS vs Btrfs on a VPS: Measured Throughput, Multi-Writer Scaling and Compression
Ext4 has been the default Linux filesystem for long enough that most administrators never choose it — they inherit it from the installer and stop thinking about it. On a…
Read MoreDiagnosing High Load Average on a VPS: Runnable vs Blocked Task Triage
A load average of 12 on a 4 vCPU box should mean everything is crawling. Sometimes it does, and sometimes the box serves requests in 40 ms while uptime reports…
Read MoreBBR + fq vs CAKE + fq_codel: Picking a Queue Discipline on a Single-vCPU VPS
Everyone has already enabled BBR. The question on a single-vCPU box is not which congestion control to use, it is what you pair it with — BBR plus fq, or…
Read MoreFail2Ban on a Busy VPS: Jail Regex Cost, Tarpit Behaviour and CPU You Didn’t Budget For
Fail2Ban installations are cheap to add and expensive to keep cheap. The package itself idles at a few megabytes, but each jail you enable spawns a log reader with a…
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