VPS and servers
Practical writing on cloud providers, infrastructure, deployment and cost, from the team behind the BuyCloudExpress catalogue.
EC2 instance families, decoded
EC2 instance names look like line noise until you learn the pattern. Once you can read them, choosing a shape becomes a two-minute decision instead of…
Running Windows workloads on Azure without overpaying
Windows Server and SQL Server licensing is where Azure bills quietly diverge from expectations. Most of the overspend comes from four specific, fixable decisions.
Oracle Cloud Always Free: what you actually get
Oracle's permanently free tier is unusually generous, particularly its Arm compute allowance. It also has real constraints that decide whether it fits your project.
Droplets or App Platform: picking the right DigitalOcean product
DigitalOcean offers a raw virtual machine and a managed application platform. The choice is really about how much operational work you want to own, and it…
A first production deployment on DigitalOcean, start to finish
The path from an empty account to an application serving real traffic over HTTPS, with the security and backup steps that are easy to skip and…
Linode after Akamai: what changed and what did not
Akamai's acquisition folded Linode into a much larger edge network. The core VPS product stayed recognisable; the surrounding platform did not.
Sizing a server for a small production workload
Most small production servers are two sizes larger than they need to be, chosen from a guess at peak traffic that never arrived. Here is a…
Why Hetzner is so much cheaper, and what the trade-offs are
Hetzner's prices are not a promotion or a loss leader. They come from a different business model, and understanding it tells you exactly which workloads belong…
Hetzner Cloud or dedicated: which one fits the workload
The choice is not about size. It is about whether your workload needs to change shape quickly, and whether you can use a whole machine.
MaxIOPS explained: what UpCloud’s storage actually does
Storage performance is the most commonly misdiagnosed bottleneck on a virtual server. Here is what IOPS and latency actually mean, and when storage is genuinely your…
When fixed instance sizes waste money
Standard cloud instances come in fixed CPU-to-memory ratios. Real workloads rarely match them, and the mismatch is paid for in resources you never use.
The OVHcloud product range, decoded
OVHcloud sells several overlapping compute products with similar names. Knowing which is which turns a confusing catalogue into a short decision.