About Uptime Notes

Uptime Notes is a small, independent documentation site about running your own servers — hosting and VPS providers, monitoring and backups, the hardware that sits under a desk, and the parts of Linux and networking that only make sense once something has broken at an inconvenient hour. We started it in 2022 after realizing the two of us had, between us, written the same explanations in Slack and support tickets often enough that writing them down once, publicly, was obviously the better use of the time.

Who writes this

Owen Pratt handles most of the hosting, hardware, and Linux-internals pieces. He's run personal servers since a Pentium 4 tower sat under a desk doing double duty as a space heater, and currently splits infrastructure time between a homelab and a small fleet of VPS boxes for client work.

Priya Anand writes most of the monitoring, backups, and reference material. She came to self-hosting from a production observability background, and has opinions about log formats that are stronger than is probably healthy.

What you'll find here

• Comparisons with real prices and real benchmarks — VPS providers, monitoring tools, hardware builds — rerun periodically rather than written once and left stale.
• Step-by-step setup guides for the kind of deployment most self-hosters actually run.
• Postmortems and explainers on the parts of Linux, DNS, and logging that are more interesting (and more useful) than they first appear.

How this site makes money

Display advertising, and nothing else. We don't run sponsored posts, and when we link to a specific provider or product it's because we tested it ourselves, not because of a placement deal. Prices and specs change — what's quoted in any given post reflects what we found at the time of writing, and you should always check current pricing before buying or signing up for anything.

Corrections and contact

If something in a post is wrong, outdated, or you've tested a provider differently than we did, we want to hear about it. We'd rather issue a correction than leave a stale number standing.