Guides
Practical writing on cloud providers, infrastructure, deployment and cost, from the team behind the BuyCloudExpress catalogue.
Right-sizing: the cheapest optimisation nobody does
Most cloud estates run at low utilisation because instances were sized from a guess and never revisited. Fixing it requires no architecture change and no new…
VPS or managed hosting: an honest comparison
The difference is not power or price. It is which problems become yours, and how many hours a month you are willing to spend on them.
What full root access actually gets you
Root access is the headline feature of every VPS listing. Here is what it genuinely enables, what it does not, and the responsibilities that arrive with…
Hardening a fresh cloud server in thirty minutes
A new public IP address starts receiving automated attacks within minutes. These steps, in this order, remove almost all of that risk before anything is exposed.
Choosing a Linux distribution for a cloud server
The distribution decides how often you are interrupted, how long the machine remains supported, and how easily you can find an answer at two in the…
SSH keys, properly
Most people generate one key, copy it everywhere, and never think about it again. A slightly better practice costs ten minutes and removes several genuinely bad…
Firewalls, security groups and network ACLs
Cloud platforms offer several overlapping ways to filter traffic. They behave differently in ways that matter, and using the wrong one produces rules that do not…
Multi-factor authentication on cloud accounts
Not all second factors are equal, and the differences matter. Here is what each one actually resists, and how to avoid locking yourself out of your…
Least privilege for cloud IAM, without grinding to a halt
Everyone agrees with least privilege and almost nobody implements it, because the strict version blocks work. Here is a version that survives contact with a real…
What to do when cloud credentials leak
Exposed keys are found by automated scanners within minutes. The order of the first hour's actions determines whether this is an incident or a disaster.
Backups and snapshots are not the same thing
Snapshots protect against infrastructure failure. Backups protect against everything else, including you. Confusing them is how organisations discover they had neither.
Object storage or block storage: which one you actually need
They both store bytes and are not substitutes. Choosing the wrong one produces either an expensive workaround or an architecture that will not scale.
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.