How-tos and reference material for running servers on an unmetered network — configuration, capacity, transfers and the questions our engineers answer most often.
Loss at a middle hop is usually a router declining to answer, not traffic being dropped. Here is what each MTR column means, why a stock Linux router rations its replies, how to check a latency step against the fibre floor, and the two-way report a support team can act on.
A VPS plan lists vCPUs the way a server lists cores, but a vCPU is a scheduling promise, not a piece of silicon. What dedicated and shared vCPUs actually guarantee, the one number that exposes contention, and a ten-minute test you can run on any plan.
Where the bytes physically sit is residency. Whose courts can compel their disclosure is sovereignty. What you owe the people the data describes follows you regardless. Conflating the three is how a compliance claim outruns the infrastructure behind it.
Most discrepancies on a new machine are a mis-seated DIMM, a drive pulled from another server, or a NIC that negotiated the wrong speed — all trivial to fix on day one and expensive in month four. An hour of acceptance testing, with the pass conditions.
Nobody quotes you a price per terabyte; you derive it, and it comes out differently under each of the three ways bandwidth is sold. Flat unmetered, 95th percentile and per-gigabyte egress, with the conversion table and the break-even formula that decides between them.
Copying data is solved; sequencing is what fails. Lower the TTL two days out, sync in two passes so the window moves only a delta, replicate rather than copy databases, and rehearse the whole cutover once a week early. Plus the six things that always break.
Your provider polls the port every five minutes, sorts the samples, throws away the top five percent and bills the rest. That is 36 free hours a month. Here is how to compute your own billed rate before the invoice arrives, and when a flat unmetered price beats it.
The BGP session is the easy step. What decides whether your route reaches anyone is the LOA, the IRR objects, and a ROA whose max length is not quietly authorising somebody else to originate your more-specifics.
A broken AAAA record does not take a site down, it makes it slower for everyone who has IPv6. The prefix you get, the static configuration to prefer, the three things that break it, and how to prove it works.
A stock kernel moves a few gigabits and then flattens. The bandwidth-delay arithmetic behind it, the sysctl ceilings to raise, the NIC queue work that follows, and the nginx settings that stop copying bytes.
Eight 12 TB drives give you 96 TB raw and four sensible ways to arrange them. What each level costs in capacity, what it buys in redundancy, and how long a rebuild really takes.
Port tiers are sold in Gbps, but workloads arrive in viewers, backup windows and downloads per hour. The arithmetic that turns one into the other, with no rounding in our favour.