Uptime Notes
Practical documentation on server hosting, self-hosting, monitoring, and the hardware under your desk — written by people who run the servers, with real prices and real benchmarks.
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Hosting & VPSThe cheapest VPS that can run a real workload in 2026: 7 providers benchmarked
“Cheapest” and “can run a real workload” are two claims that VPS marketing pages make constantly and rarely prove at the same time. Every provider's pricing page has a plan under $10 a…
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Monitoring & BackupsUptime monitoring tools compared: what you get free and when to pay
Every self-hoster eventually gets paged — or worse, doesn't get paged — by something they run. The question isn't whether you need uptime monitoring; a free checker that pings your site…
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HardwareBuild a quiet home server for under $400
Every home server build guide eventually recommends a $1,200 rack-mount chassis with eight drive bays, and most people reading this don't need that. You need something that holds a few…
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Hosting & VPSDeploy a Docker Compose stack on a fresh Ubuntu VPS
This guide assumes nothing about your stack beyond “it's defined in a docker-compose.yml” and nothing about your VPS beyond “it's a fresh Ubuntu box with root access.” That covers the…
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Monitoring & BackupsBackups that actually restore: the 3-2-1 rule for self-hosters
“I have backups” is one of the most confidently stated and least verified claims in self-hosting. Plenty of people have a cron job that runs pg_dump into a folder on the same disk as the…
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Linux InternalsHow Linux schedules I/O, and why your server stalls under load
There's a particular kind of server problem that doesn't show up as high CPU, doesn't show up as low memory, and doesn't show up in a casual glance at top: everything just feels slow,…
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PostmortemsPostmortem: the DNS change that took us down for four hours
We're publishing this postmortem close to as-written, with only names and some identifying specifics removed, because the mechanics of what went wrong — a DNS record change colliding with a…
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ReferenceA field guide to log formats
Anyone who has tried to grep through a mixed pile of logs from five different services knows the actual problem is rarely volume — it's that no two of them agree on where the timestamp…