Guides
Practical writing on cloud providers, infrastructure, deployment and cost, from the team behind the BuyCloudExpress catalogue.
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…
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.
How to read an uptime SLA properly
A 99.99% SLA is a billing agreement, not a promise about your application. Reading one correctly means knowing what it measures, what it excludes, and what…
Choosing a data centre location that matches your users
Region choice sets a latency floor you cannot optimise past, and a legal context you cannot ignore. Both are decided at provisioning time and expensive to…
Data sovereignty in Europe: what it means for your architecture
Sovereignty is not the same as residency, and confusing the two produces architectures that satisfy neither. Here is the distinction and what it changes.
How to read a cloud bill
A cloud invoice is organised for accounting, not for understanding. Reading it usefully means regrouping it around three questions rather than scrolling the line items.
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.
Committed use, reserved instances and savings plans compared
Every major cloud sells a discount in exchange for a commitment. The mechanisms differ in what you promise, and promising the wrong thing is how commitments…
The egress fee trap
Data going into a cloud is usually free. Data coming out is not, and for some workloads it quietly becomes the largest line on the bill.
Budget alerts that actually catch runaway spend
A single monthly budget alert usually fires days after the damage is done. A layered set of alerts catches the same problem within hours.
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.