Monitoring, Outages
Why Website Monitoring Matters Before Something Breaks
Without monitoring, your customers are your outage detection. Here is what a business website should actually be watching, what to alert on, and what to ignore.
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Articles
What we see managing a lot of websites and servers
Hosting, WordPress, Cloudflare, AWS, Linux, backups, monitoring and security — explained for the people who have to make decisions about them, not just the people who run them.
Backups, Disaster recovery
How to Know If Your Backups Actually Work
Most businesses have backups. Far fewer have backups that would actually bring the site back. Here are the five questions that separate the two, and how to test in an afternoon.
Read articleWebsite management, Migrations
What We Check Before Taking Over a Website
The first-day review we run on every site a client hands us — before changing anything. It's mostly about finding out what's true, and it's the origin of our 27-point checklist.
Read articleHosting, AWS
AWS vs VPS vs Managed WordPress Hosting
Three ways to host a business website, what each one actually costs in money and attention, and how to pick based on what your site does rather than what sounds impressive.
Read articleHosting, Cost
When Cheap Hosting Becomes Expensive
A $10-a-month hosting plan is genuinely the right choice for many businesses. Here is how to tell when it has stopped being one, before the bill arrives in a form you didn't expect.
Read articleCloudflare, Security
Cloudflare WAF Rules Every Business Website Should Consider
Putting a site behind Cloudflare is the easy part. These are the WAF, rate-limiting and access rules that actually reduce load and risk on a typical business or WordPress site.
Read articleLinux, Server capacity
What Actually Causes a Server to Run Out of Memory
Memory exhaustion is the most common cause of a website going down 'for no reason'. Here is what is really happening, in plain language, and the three settings that prevent it.
Read articleWordPress, Performance
5 Reasons WordPress Sites Suddenly Get Slow
A WordPress site that was fine last month and is slow now almost always has one of five causes. Here is how to tell which, in the order we check them.
Read articleThe Infrastructure Brief
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Practical website and infrastructure advice for businesses that don’t have a full infrastructure team — from the engineer who runs hosting, WordPress and AWS environments for CloudWatch clients. What breaks, why, and what to do about it before it costs you.
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