Founding editor
Owen Pratt
Owen Pratt started Uptime Notes in 2022 after years of running personal servers, going back to a Pentium 4 tower that doubled as a space heater under his desk. He splits his time between a home lab with a rotating cast of mini PCs and a handful of VPS boxes he manages for client work, and he rebuilds his monitoring stack from scratch every year or two just to see what breaks. He writes most of the hosting, Linux internals, and postmortem pieces because those are the systems he is elbow deep in on a given weekend.
Covers Hosting & VPS, Linux Internals, Postmortems
Latest from Owen
The cheapest VPS that can run a real workload in 2026: 7 providers benchmarkedWe rented the cheapest viable plan at seven VPS providers and ran identical CPU, disk, network, and load-test benchmarks on each. Prices, specs, and sign-up links included.
Deploy a Docker Compose stack on a fresh Ubuntu VPSA step-by-step guide to taking a brand-new Ubuntu VPS from any provider to a running Docker Compose stack behind a reverse proxy, with a domain pointed at it.
How Linux schedules I/O, and why your server stalls under loadAn explainer on how Linux's block-layer I/O schedulers work — none, mq-deadline, bfq, and kyber — and how to diagnose a server that stalls under disk load.
Postmortem: the DNS change that took us down for four hoursA lightly edited internal postmortem of a DNS record change that caused a four-hour outage — the timeline, the TTL caching chain that delayed the fix, and what changed afterward.