Managed WordPress hosting and a self-managed VPS can both serve a fast site. They differ on which failures land on you. A practical comparison covering visit metering, disallowed plugin policies, silent backup failure, patching debt, and a cost model that survives contact with reality.
Running Docker Compose in production is a reasonable choice for a single host, but the defaults were chosen for a laptop. A walk through the failure families that actually bite: the deploy gap, unrotated logs filling the disk, anonymous volumes, published ports that bypass your firewall, secrets in environment variables, and health checks that report without acting.
MySQL was gone in the morning because the kernel picked it to reclaim memory from Redis. Redis ships configured as a durable datastore, and you are using it as a cache. Setup takes ten minutes; the gotchas are memory limits, shared namespaces and the one enormous key nobody mentions.
You set PasswordAuthentication no, restarted SSH, and moved on. Months later the logs show successful password logins, because a vendor drop-in file sorted earlier and won. A VPS setup and hardening checklist where every step comes with the command that proves it worked.
Your browser shows a padlock and your partner's API client throws "unable to get local issuer certificate". Both are correct. A practical guide to the four things a TLS client actually checks, and to renewal automation that reaches the running server instead of just the disk.
A deploy key in GitHub secrets is a shell on your production server, handed to a container you don't control, running code from maintainers you've never met. Here's how to build the pipeline so a leaked key isn't worth much: forced commands, scoped sudo, pinned actions and a real approval gate.
The top search result tells you to run docker system prune -a --volumes. It frees the space and deletes your database. Here is how to measure Docker disk usage properly, reclaim it from safest to most destructive, and fix the logs that Docker never reports on.
Two static binaries, a package and four systemd units. How to install Prometheus and Grafana on a single server from scratch, wire in node_exporter, put nginx and TLS in front, and keep the ports that have no authentication off the public internet.
Almost every TLS certificate error traces back to one of three causes: a broken chain, a hostname the certificate does not cover, or an expiry nobody was watching. Here is how to tell them apart in under a minute, and how to stop the third one from ever happening again.
Most "the site is down" tickets are really DNS problems wearing a costume. Here's the practical DNS troubleshooting workflow I use — how to read dig output, follow the delegation chain, decode SERVFAIL and NXDOMAIN, and stop blaming propagation for things that are actually caching, TTL, or DNSSEC failures.