Guides
Practical writing on cloud providers, infrastructure, deployment and cost, from the team behind the BuyCloudExpress catalogue.
Designing for a region outage without rebuilding everything
Full multi-region redundancy is expensive and hard. There is a great deal of useful resilience available well before that point, and most teams skip straight past…
CDNs: what they fix, and what they do not
A CDN is the highest-return infrastructure change available to most sites, and it is regularly deployed in a way that caches nothing.
Load balancers, explained without the diagram
A load balancer does more than spread traffic. Its health checks, connection draining and TLS handling are what turn a deployment from disruptive into invisible.
DNS for people who deploy things
DNS causes an outsized share of deployment incidents, almost always through the same handful of misunderstandings about caching, record types and delegation.
Private networking between cloud servers
Servers talking to each other over public addresses is slower, less safe and often billed. Private networking fixes all three, and is far easier to set…
Running containers on a single server
Containers are useful long before you need an orchestrator. On one server they solve dependency conflicts, make deployments repeatable and make the machine disposable.
When Kubernetes is the wrong answer
Kubernetes solves real problems very well. Adopting it before you have those problems trades a small amount of deployment friction for a large amount of permanent…
Infrastructure as code: a starting point that does not overwhelm
You do not need to define your entire estate in code to get most of the benefit. Start with the parts that would be painful to…
CI/CD onto a cloud server without a platform
A reliable deployment pipeline onto a plain server needs four things. None of them require a deployment platform, and all of them are worth having before…
Zero-downtime deploys on modest infrastructure
Seamless releases are usually presented as a property of large platforms. The mechanism is simple enough to implement on two servers, or even one.
GPU instances: what you are actually paying for
GPU instances are among the most expensive things you can rent and among the most commonly underused. The difference between good and poor value is almost…
Migrating from shared hosting to a cloud server
The move is mostly straightforward. The parts that go wrong are predictable, and nearly all of them are avoided by ordering the steps correctly.
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.