Guides
Practical writing on cloud providers, infrastructure, deployment and cost, from the team behind the BuyCloudExpress catalogue.
How the AWS Free Tier actually works
The AWS Free Tier is three different things wearing one name. Knowing which parts expire, which never do, and which quietly bill you is the difference…
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…
Azure tenants, subscriptions and resource groups: how the hierarchy fits together
Azure's account hierarchy has more layers than most clouds, and getting it wrong is expensive to undo. Here is what each layer is actually for.
Spot VMs on Google Cloud: when the discount is worth it
Spot instances trade certainty for a large discount. The question is never whether they are cheaper, it is whether your workload can survive being interrupted with…
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.
BigQuery for people who have never used a data warehouse
BigQuery behaves unlike the databases most developers already know. Understanding why it is fast, and what makes it expensive, takes about ten minutes and saves a…
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…
Oracle Autonomous Database, in plain language
Autonomous Database automates the work a database administrator would otherwise do. Knowing which parts it automates, and which it does not, tells you whether it replaces…
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.
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…
About these guides
What these guides cover
These cloud computing guides are written for the same people who buy from the catalogue: developers, startups, agencies, businesses and researchers who need infrastructure to work without becoming a full-time job. There are fifty of them, each tied to the providers actually involved, and none of them assume you already know the vocabulary.
Where to start
It depends what you are trying to settle:
- Choosing a platform — VPS or managed hosting: an honest comparison and Why Hetzner is so much cheaper, and what the trade-offs are.
- Keeping the bill down — How to read a cloud bill, The egress fee trap and Right-sizing: the cheapest optimisation nobody does.
- Not getting broken into — Hardening a fresh cloud server in thirty minutes, SSH keys, properly and Least privilege for cloud IAM, without grinding to a halt.
- Shipping changes safely — Zero-downtime deploys on modest infrastructure and CI/CD onto a cloud server without a platform.
Guides and the catalogue
Each guide names the provider it was written against and links to the matching account, so you can move from reading to doing without hunting for the product. If you would rather browse the stock first, the cloud account catalogue lists all ten providers with their configurations and prices.
Nothing here is provider marketing. We are an independent marketplace, not affiliated with any of the platforms discussed, and the guides say plainly when a provider is the wrong choice for a particular job.