DirectAdmin gives each user one PHP-FPM pool, not each site. That single design fact explains most of the 502s on a busy shared box. Here is how to find the pool files, size pm.max_children from real memory numbers, set per-site limits that WordPress cannot override, and make the changes survive the next rewrite_confs.
Uptime checks and RUM measure different things, and each one is structurally blind to failures the other catches. A practical breakdown of what synthetic probes miss, why RUM goes quiet during a real outage, and how to combine them without paying for two overlapping platforms.
Benchmarks pick the wrong winner. Here is how Nginx, Apache and Caddy actually differ in production: how each one fails under load, who owns certificate renewal, and where configuration lives when a developer needs to change it. Includes a decision procedure and the mistakes I see most.
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 got PageSpeed Insights to 98 and six weeks later Search Console still says the same URLs are failing. The score and the assessment measure different things, and Lighthouse cannot measure INP at all. Here is how to fix Core Web Vitals on WordPress in the order that actually moves the report.
Your homepage loads instantly and your dashboard takes eight seconds. That is not a contradiction: wp-admin is the only part of your site that never gets cached. Here is where the time actually goes, in the order worth checking.
Put a CDN in front of a dynamic site carelessly and it will cache one user's personalised page and serve it to everyone — invisibly, because your logged-in browser looks fine. Here is how to classify routes, set cache headers that hold, and run the two curl commands that catch the leak.