Every server I run leans on a pile of credentials: database passwords, FTP logins, API keys for Pexels and OpenAI, IndexNow tokens, deploy hooks. Across the se...
Pick the wrong backup tool for your VPS and you find out at the worst possible moment: during a restore, at 2 a.m., while a client is asking why their site is d...
Three years ago the open-source virtualization conversation was basically "Proxmox or VMware." VMware's 2024 licensing overhaul under Broadcom blew that up, an...
Every self-hosted service on a VPS eventually hits the same wall: you have three or four apps listening on different ports, you want clean subdomains instead o...
If you have ever stared at a Railway or Render invoice and thought "I could run this myself for the price of a coffee," you are exactly the person these three t...
If you run more than two servers, the question of how to manage Docker stops being a luxury and starts being a daily chore. I hit that wall myself last year. Ac...
For the past two years I have run all my operational alerts — cron failures, blog import errors, SSH fail2ban trips, IndexNow rejections — through a...
Last month I needed to host a small internal control plane for one of our client projects — nothing fancy, just three services, a Postgres pod, and a job runn...
I have spent the last six weeks running Plane, OpenProject, and Leantime side-by-side on the same Hostinger KVM 4 VPS — 4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, NVMe — and rotat...
PostgreSQL 18 shipped on September 25, 2025, and the headline feature — asynchronous I/O — is the first reason in years to seriously plan a same-week upgrad...
I spent the last three months running Documenso, Docuseal, and OpenSign side-by-side on the same Hetzner CPX21 VPS (3 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, $9.42/month) to figure out...
Six months ago I migrated a Photography Studio Manager client's 11-year contract archive — about 18,400 scanned PDFs, model releases, invoices, and shoot brie...
If you have an OpenAI API key, an Anthropic key, and maybe a local Ollama box, you are paying for three different web UIs that all do roughly the same thing —...
When I started looking at self-hosted alternatives for the AI features inside our internal stack — specifically SmartExam (an AI question generator), DocSumm ...
When I built the embeddings layer for SmartExam AI Generator last quarter — a tool that turns curriculum PDFs into question banks — I needed a vector store ...
Last quarter I migrated three of our seven aggregator sites off Cloudflare Tunnel onto Pangolin running on a $7/month Hetzner VPS. The trigger was specific: Clo...
I run seven aggregator sites on Hostinger plus a separate VPS for heavier automation, and over the last 18 months I've moved most of my cross-site glue work fro...
Self-hosting your photo library used to be a nerd hobby. After Google Photos quietly tightened its free storage in 2021 and Apple kept nudging iCloud subscriber...
TL;DR — which one I would deploy today If you have less than 2 GB free RAM on a typical $7 KVM VPS and you need full-text search with typo tolerance for a web...
Connecting a fleet of VPS instances that span Hostinger shared, Hetzner cloud, and a couple of bare-metal boxes used to mean port-forwards, IP allowlists, and t...
Across the seven aggregator sites I run on Hostinger shared and a handful of VPS boxes, I keep coming back to the same question: when does SQLite stop being a "...
I have been running self-hosted password infrastructure for our team at Warung Digital Teknologi (wardigi.com) since late 2022. Across the 50+ client projects w...
Three years ago, when I was setting up the first generation of our aggregator stack at Warung Digital Teknologi, I made a mistake that quietly cost me about 40 ...
Self-hosted analytics finally hit a tipping point in 2026. Between Google Analytics 4 fatigue, the post-April Core Update push toward verifiable first-party dat...
Last December, I ran a hard test on my own backup setup. I picked the smallest of the seven aggregator sites I run, deleted the entire public_html directory on ...
If you're running Redis on a VPS in 2026, you've probably hit the same crossroads I did six months ago: Redis went AGPLv3, your hyperscaler quietly migrated to ...
Last December I shipped a small change to the way our 7 aggregator sites talk to MySQL, and within an hour two of them started returning 502s. The problem wasn'...
I have been running self-hosted uptime monitoring on a $4.50/month Hetzner CX22 VPS for the last 18 months — initially to keep tabs on seven aggregator sites ...
Three years ago I picked Nginx for everything because it was the default in every Laravel deployment guide I had ever read. Today I am running a mix of Caddy, N...
Fly.io vs Railway vs Render 2026: Which PaaS Actually Holds Up in Production? I've deployed Laravel backends, Next.js frontends, and Node.js microservices acr...
MinIO Community Edition Is Gone: The 5 Best Self-Hosted S3-Compatible Storage Alternatives in 2026 On February 13, 2026, the MinIO GitHub repository was offi...
Thunder Compute H100 vs Runpod Secure Cloud in 2026 is one of those GPU rental comparisons that looks obvious until you inspect the fine print. I have a petty ...
Runpod vs Thunder Compute for LLM inference in 2026 is exactly the kind of comparison that sounds simple until you look past the first pricing table. GPU cloud...
Three months ago I paid $340 for a Ubiquiti UDM Pro to handle routing and firewall duties for a small office network I manage. It died after 11 weeks. The fan b...
Wednesday morning. 6:43 AM. I'm scrolling Hacker News while my instant noodles steep (yes, I eat instant noodles for breakfast — judge me later). A post with...
You know that brief pause when you open ChatGPT? That half-second where you can't type yet and a little spinner does its thing? I always assumed it was loading ...
A developer named Andrea Marcheschi cracked open the White House's new mobile app last week like a kid opening a birthday present, and what he found inside was ...
Of all the companies you'd expect to get breached, HackerOne would be near the bottom of the list. This is the bug bounty platform used by the Department of Def...
LocalStack Just Killed Its Free Tier and I Almost Panicked — Then I Found Floci I got the email on a Monday morning. March 3rd, 2026. Coffee in hand, Slack a...
A few weeks ago, my friend Kat — who runs a small Etsy shop that somehow grew into a real business — called me in mild panic. "James, I am paying $47 a mont...
At 10:53 AM on March 17, 2026, CISA — the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — added CVE-2025-47813 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilitie...
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." ...
Let me tell you about the worst 14 minutes of my professional life. It was a Tuesday, around 3:47 PM, and I had just pushed a commit to a public repository that...
Ben Zimmermann was poking around vuejs.org last October when he found something that should not have been there: an Algolia API key with full admin permissions ...
On March 12, 2026 at approximately 18:25 UTC, a threat actor operating under the handle ByteToBreach posted what they claimed to be the complete source code of ...
On March 12, 2026, an international law enforcement operation codenamed "Operation Lightning" dismantled a criminal proxy service called SocksEscort. If you hav...
On Wednesday morning, employees at Stryker — a $25-billion medical technology company with 56,000 workers across 61 countries — arrived at work to find thei...
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 following homomorphic encryption for about five years now, which puts me in a very small and very nerdy club of people who get genuinely excited abo...
If you are running FortiGate firewalls in your network right now, stop reading this on your phone and go sit at your desk. This is one of those articles. Senti...