Game servers hand their address to strangers, run mostly on UDP and notice every lost packet, so a generic flood filter can hurt as much as the attack. What a Minecraft server should expose, how a Velocity proxy hides the backend, why open query ports reflect floods, and what to ask a host.
Why a flood aimed at one VPS is a flood at every guest on its node, why budget hosts answer with a null route, what DDoS protection has to mean on a VPS, what the guest still handles itself, the questions to ask a host, and when a protected VPS is enough or a dedicated server is the better buy.
A server cannot filter a flood that has already filled its port, so protection has to sit upstream. How the filtering works, why hosts null-route unprotected IPs, always-on versus on-demand, what a 100 Gbps tier does and does not cover, how big a tier to buy and seven questions to ask any host.
A hidden primary, three secondaries in different cities and networks, TSIG-signed NOTIFY and zone transfers, a working Knot DNS config with automatic DNSSEC signing, and the dig commands that prove an authoritative DNS server answers correctly. Plus what it costs and when managed DNS wins.
Nobody watches the hardware of a dedicated server for you. What to monitor in five layers: disks, RAID, ECC memory and IPMI sensors; space, memory, load and clock; interface errors and bond members; the service from a second location; and a minimal Prometheus and Alertmanager stack with seven alert rules.
A home connection uploads a fraction of what it downloads, and every remote Plex stream leaves through that upload. Why a data-centre port fixes it, why to design for direct play, Plex's PassMark guide to CPU sizing, the GPU and pass catch on hardware transcoding, remote streaming rules and how far 72 TB goes.
Getting data into a cloud is free; getting it out is billed by the gigabyte. AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Oracle and R2 list rates side by side, what 10 to 300 TB a month costs, the NAT and cross-zone charges the price page hides, and the two ways out: exit waivers and flat-rate ports.
A Java Edition server runs its world on one thread with a 50 ms budget per tick, so clock speed matters more than core count. What the server uses, Java against Bedrock, which server software to run, sizing by players, three settings that beat new hardware, and when a VPS gives way to a dedicated machine.
One UDP port, a dozen lines of configuration and an encryption protocol built into the Linux kernel. From a fresh Ubuntu or Debian server to a working tunnel on a laptop and a phone, including the IPv6 leak most guides miss, split tunnelling, MTU fixes and keeping the server locked down.
A bond of two 10 Gbps links carries 20 Gbps in total, but no single connection runs faster than one link. Why LACP hashes each flow to one member, the default setting that sends all of a server's traffic down one port, a working netplan config, and how to test the aggregate properly.
Managed Kubernetes hides the control plane, the load balancers and the storage behind an API and bills for every gigabyte that leaves. On bare metal, compute is cheaper and egress is flat, but those pieces become yours. The decisions in order, with a costed three-server cluster at the end.
Both give you root over SSH, and on day one they feel the same. The difference shows when you load a kernel module, run Docker, tune the network or install anything that is not Linux. How KVM and containers work, what only your own kernel allows, and the one command that tells you which you have.