Hosting & Infrastructure
I've been around web hosting since the mid-2000s and have spent years running my own small provider. That changes the way I look at this stuff. I am less interested in a perfect reference architecture than I am in whether a server can be understood, monitored, backed up, repaired, and recovered when something goes sideways at an inconvenient hour.
Hosting also has a habit of making every technology somebody else's problem until it becomes yours. A slow website might be PHP, MySQL, storage, DNS, a full filesystem, a noisy VM, a bad route, or a customer plugin doing something spectacularly stupid. These pages are where I write down the parts I actually use and the lessons I do not want to relearn.
Running a hosting provider
- Running a Small Independent Hosting Provider
- Shared, Reseller, VPS, Dedicated, and Colocation
- Capacity Planning and Growth
- Lessons from Long-Term Hosting Operations
Platforms I work with
- cPanel and WHM
- Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server
- Reverse Proxies and TLS
- Data Centers and Remote Management
Keeping things alive
- Backups and Disaster Recovery
- Server Migrations
- Monitoring with LibreNMS
- Checklists I actually use
- Abuse Handling and Incident Response
A few things I have learned the hard way
- A backup is only interesting after you have proved you can restore it.
- Out-of-band access is boring right up until the moment you need it.
- Simple systems are easier to fix at 2:00 a.m. than clever systems.
- If a change has no rollback plan, it is not ready for production.
- Customers care a lot more about honest communication and reliable service than whatever buzzword is on the architecture diagram.
The individual pages get more technical. This page is just the front door.
Last Modified: September 23, 2026, 2:28 pm