Uptime monitoring that tells you what actually happenedWhat a server dashboard should tell you (and what most of them don't)A storage limit that is actually a limitThe delete that reported success and did nothingContainers and VMs from one panel, without lying about the differenceAnalytics without a tracker: everything your access log already knows17 essays · 8 sectionsUptime monitoring that tells you what actually happenedWhat a server dashboard should tell you (and what most of them don't)A storage limit that is actually a limitThe delete that reported success and did nothingContainers and VMs from one panel, without lying about the differenceAnalytics without a tracker: everything your access log already knows17 essays · 8 sections

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A storage limit that is actually a limit
Engineering

A storage limit that is actually a limit

Most per-site disk quotas in hosting panels are a number in a database that nothing enforces. We made ours a real filesystem the site cannot see past — here is what that took, and what it broke.

Alpha Labs· 8 min Read more →
Analytics without a tracker: everything your access log already knows
Engineering

Analytics without a tracker: everything your access log already knows

Traffic, countries, devices, referrers, error rates and slow pages — all of it is sitting in a file nginx is already writing. No JavaScript, no third party, no consent banner. Here is how to get it

Alpha Labs· 8 min Read more →
PHP-FPM workers never shrink. Here is how to bound them
Performance

PHP-FPM workers never shrink. Here is how to bound them

A worker measured 30 MB when fresh and 97 MB forty hours later, on an idle server. Nothing was leaking — that is simply how PHP returns memory.

Alien XP· 3 min Read more →
Soft 404s are quietly costing you search traffic
Engineering

Soft 404s are quietly costing you search traffic

If every mistyped URL returns your home page with a 200, search engines will index all of them as real pages — and split your ranking across the duplicates.

Alien XP· 2 min Read more →
Your sitemap might be lying to you
Engineering

Your sitemap might be lying to you

A static sitemap.xml wins over any dynamic route, and a generator that walks the filesystem cannot see content stored in a database.

Alien XP· 2 min Read more →
Real analytics from nginx logs, with no logging stack
Craft

Real analytics from nginx logs, with no logging stack

Page views, top pages and per-site traffic, from the file already on your disk — no JavaScript, no third party, no Elasticsearch.

Alien XP· 2 min Read more →
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