Our great sponsors
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nench
VPS benchmark script — based on the popular bench.sh, plus CPU and ioping tests, and dual-stack IPv4 and v6 speedtests by default
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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Ansible
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.
For the biggest pioneers, there is also a variant to build your own GeoDNS service with your own name servers. But for this to make sense and real value, anycast IP addresses would be needed. Also a number of other reliable servers around the world with DDoS protection and then understand, select and adapt eg EdgeDNS or Czech Knot DNS (which also uses Cloudflare). However, commercial GeoDNS services are relatively cheap and reliable, so we can’t imagine an ROI that would make sense with our own small, non-commercial DNS solution.
Virtual vs. physical server — this is a rather controversial topic and it is not appropriate to generalize it. If the economy allows, choose physical servers for critical servers, even if only those from the basic menu. Redundant disks are a must, ideally with redundant power supply. With a physical server, you usually get a 1 Gbps uplink and a direct physical connection directly to the ToR switch. There is a much lower chance that you will struggle with sharing CPU and IO or connectivity on a physical hypervisor running hundreds, or dozens of virtual servers at best. If you’re lucky, they have a shared “tube” of * × 10 Gbit, or worse, they have 1 Gbit. With authenticated providers you don’t even have to worry about virtual servers, just watch the aggregation and performance (eg benchmark nench). Over time, the collected metrics will also tell you a lot, especially for redundant PoPs that will handle ± the same traffic (DNS round-robin). As a result, we have very quickly detected very aggressive CPU throttling or volatile IO performance at some providers.
We use and recommend Ansible. Historically, we’ve also used Puppet, Chef and SaltStack for a while, but only Ansible meets what we need for many years. Over the years of use, we have over 80 own roles in it, so when preparing each additional server, the most time-consuming is order and waiting for an activation e-mail. If we have 10 or 50 servers, it doesn’t matter from the orchestration point of view.