25 July 2026
TTFB 620ms → 180ms with Redis object cache Just did this on a $6 box running a plugin-heavy WP membership site. Every page rebuilt the same options queries, ~40 DB round trips per load. — apt install …
24 July 2026
Halved query time by sizing the buffer pool right Just did this on a $10 box, 4GB RAM, MariaDB serving 20 sites. Default innodb_buffer_pool_size was 128MB so the disk got hammered every query. Hot dat…
23 July 2026
Dropped SSH log noise from 40k lines/day to 12 Just did this across 8 budget boxes. Auth logs were drowning in bot login attempts, made real incidents invisible. Moved SSH off 22 and added one allowli…
22 July 2026
fail2ban cut my bandwidth bill 18GB/mo on one box Just did this on a $5 box running 12 WordPress sites. xmlrpc and wp-login brute force was 90k hits/day, all 200s/401s burning transfer. Wrote a jail r…
21 July 2026
10s of dynamic load survived on a $5 box with a 1s microcache Guide site got hit by a newsletter blast, 4k concurrent, PHP-FPM pegged at 100% and timing out. Dropped in nginx fastcgi microcache, 1 sec…
20 July 2026
Cut PHP-FPM memory 40% by switching pm to static Just did this on a $6 box hosting one busy WooCommerce store. pm = dynamic was spawning and killing workers all day, eating CPU on fork churn. Measured…