For the last 10 years, I've managed servers for
@levelsio
(Nomad List, Remote OK + PhotoAI), Ghost and many others.
I've learnt a lot, and met a bunch of helpful people, so I thought it'd be nice to have a community dedicated to server problems:
⚙️
Post
Vercel pricing is absolutely insane, it blows my mind
Data transfer starts at $150/TB with 1TB included
Hetzner gives 20TB free, and then it's €1.19/TB
So 20TB on Vercel is $2850, on Hetzner it's free (included with VPS)
And then you have to pay extra per request?
Perhaps
In the Netherlands, the cucumbers are from Spain
In Spain, the cucumbers are from the Netherlands
How can this make sense? What's the underlying market force at play here?
My favorite thing about the PHP stack is it lends itself to simplicity. You run Nginx + PHP-FPM, and point it to some files. Website updates = replace the files. No application restarts, no container issues, no complex deployment strategies, no crazy stateful application logic
working on side projects is like a video game
you're on a difficult mission
and you gotta find your way through the level
sometimes you die and go back to start
but you learn
If you currently use Docker Desktop, I can highly recommend switching to
@OrbStack
:
It's faster, lighter and has other great features like:
- automatic local HTTPS
- full Linux machines w/ shared mounts
- native K8s engine
- not incredibly painful to use
Most people are missing the point of having a simple setup.
How much time has been saved by not having to deal with the ever-changing mess of "modern" development?
Time better spent building features, marketing, making money or enjoying life
The CPU % on my VPS server even went down not up since
@lexfridman
podcast and
@elonmusk
tweet
While traffic more than tripled and revenue doubled
Not serverless, not edge, not kubernetes, not auto scaling
Just 1 simple VPS for all my sites
Thx to
@DanielLockyer
my DevOps guy
⚙️Today I was adding my upcoming trips to
@NomadList
but I realised how slow the user pages were so
@levelsio
and I spent a few hours speeding them up (using techniques from ) - making them 61% faster! 🔥
Decided to run a marathon on a running track a couple of days ago. Been wanting to do this for a while and it did not disappoint. Expected hard mental effort but 3.5 hours flew by. 10/10 would do again
💀 The
@linode
server powering
@NomadList
and
@remote_ok
went down and then corrupted a couple of days ago.
👍 I managed to fix it and get it back up within 1 hour.
✍️ I wrote about what happened and how it was fixed.
So we've had AI for a while now - where are we at with AI automatic bug fixes?
Receive error (Sentry whatever) -> come up with fix -> open PR -> maybe auto-merge if high confidence?
Is this a thing yet?
Remember, software development is just a means to an end
For
@levelsio
, running a business and making an impact is more important. Refactoring code, updating to the latest version of xyz framework, or figuring out why his code isn't deploying is not a productive use of time
Putting the Cloudflare free plan in front of your site (takes a matter of minutes, depending on DNS) is one of the quickest wins I can think of for increased speed and security
This is why I love Cloudflare. Owning your own hardware doesn't mean you can't contract with a bodyguard. We do that and it saved our bacon a few months ago when we were attacked.
Don't place ads from a 3rd party on your site if you want to keep it fast.
I'm looking at a 300ms loading time (7 requests) site that turned into 5.3 seconds (177 requests) with just 3 ads added to the page. + 23 more DNS lookups and 3 cancelled requests.
🤯
If you're using the Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics scripts just for tracking page views & stats (like most of us), you might be interested in switching to . It's a lightweight (just 2% of GTM+GA size) alternative that's been working great for me
I can't stop thinking about this story about
@elonmusk
+
@X
Elon: we need to kill this extra datacenter
Engineers: we need 6 months
Elon: you can do it in 6 days
Elon on Dec 24th: flies to datacenter and cuts cables to server rack
Just found some old photos from my consultancy work 5yrs ago.
This one was a PHP 5.6 to 7.2 upgrade - ~140% CPU to ~10%?
It was one of those times where the graph is so unbelievable that you need to double-check the website is still running (it was) 🙈
I've recently been binge watching
@awesomekling
's YT videos about building
@ladybirdbrowser
I'm not usually into programming videos but it's fun to see underneath the hood of a browser, and to follow debugging and feature dev outside of my usual areas
Just added a new feature to my running pace calculator with 1 sentence in Cursor - the ability to input custom distances
I could have done it myself, but I can guarantee it'd take more time than it takes to write a sentence
If you use 1Password, one of my favorite local setup tips is to move all those secrets you store in bashrc/zshrc/config etc into it, and switch to the CLI to inject them into your commands/scripts
Such a nice experience to use Touch ID to auth all access
Just upgraded one of my app's Heroku Redis plans to Premium 3 to handle the volume of background jobs for large customers. I have a strong feeling that paying $120/month for a managed Redis instance with only 500 MB of memory in 2024 is pure robbery 😡
⌛️ It's finally time to upgrade your PHP installations. Both PHP 5.6 and 7.0 are being set to End-Of-Life status in ~2 months and will lose future security updates. I can help upgrade your server and code to the latest versions - DM me. Why is this a big deal? 👇
And it's worth pointing out it's not just for Rails apps, but anything that can be containerized
Seeing a lot of friends using Kamal these days, and it looks like a great offering, so go run your apps on your own VPS!
Kamal 2.0 has been released! Now with a own bespoke Kamal Proxy, which brings auto SSL certificates and multiple-apps-on-a-single-box, with virtually no configuration. It's never been easy to avoid PaaS, embrace your own server, and deploy to prod.
Controversial opinion but I think AWS is massively overrated and overpriced. You can get much better alternatives for cheaper. For example,
@backblaze
B2 vs Amazon S3 vs others 👇
Recently switched from an 14" M1 Max MacBook Pro to a 13" M3 MacBook Air and I think it was a good move.
Battery life is insane and it's so incredibly thin/light. Never heard the fans for my workload on M1 so not concerned about them not on M3.
Downsides: no HDMI, speakers not
@levelsio
@ashishlogmaster
@newrelic
Yeah not sure. I don't think we've got auto-upgrades on for this package. It's possible our application code started to hit some bug in the agent. There's no single repro from their GitHub issues
🎉 It looks like support is being added to 💎
@rubygems
for building 🦀
@rustlang
native extensions.
This is great news and will mean it's easier to write fast + safe code modules (like
@Deliveroo
did - )
🤔 Are you developing a site and it's a little slow?
👉 Throw it into and send me the report. For a quick consultation, I'll tell you exactly what you need to do to speed it up.
🐌 Don't be stuck with a slow site
⚙️ I made this using
@brendangregg
's Flame Graph visualizer and XDebug trace output. Combining it with is how we've made huge performance gains recently ⚡️ I wrote about it on my blog 👇
Recently worked on optimizing the loading speed of a Shopify e-commerce store. Just my changes alone (which included a 40% drop in load time) increased their conversion rate by 26% from 1.8% to 2.3% 🤑
✅ Chiang Mai Marathon completed!
That's around a 35 minute PB from my last official time, so I'm pretty happy with that. It was pretty weird to start running @ 3am, and then finish before sunrise but the experience was worth it.
Today's running thought - treat your body like a business:
- invest in long-term growth and success (cardio, strength, nutrition, sleep, recovery, massages)
- cut the risks that could derail progress (alcohol, stress)
- don't be afraid to pivot; it's never too late to start
~160 people in the community now. Already loads of great questions about tooling, hosting platforms + specific setups. Going to be working on a deep dive into the server setup for
@levelsio
this weekend
to join
For the last 10 years, I've managed servers for
@levelsio
(Nomad List, Remote OK + PhotoAI), Ghost and many others.
I've learnt a lot, and met a bunch of helpful people, so I thought it'd be nice to have a community dedicated to server problems:
⚙️
Post
I love these high-density info sites, comparing products against each other. No flashy design, just hard numbers
This one is
I wonder what else you could build one for?
💻 The
@googlechrome
team are looking into shaming sites that load slowly, directly within the browser.
Even more of a reason to ensure your site is loading fast ⚡️
Traction is going great (hi all new members! ❤️), but I've since discovered that Stripe's processing fees are WILD for such small payments. Going to be upping the subscription fee soon to cover all the costs. It's worth it though, promise.
For the last 10 years, I've managed servers for
@levelsio
(Nomad List, Remote OK + PhotoAI), Ghost and many others.
I've learnt a lot, and met a bunch of helpful people, so I thought it'd be nice to have a community dedicated to server problems:
⚙️
Post
How do people handle DB migrations in their application? (particularly rollbacks) Is there not a period of time where the DB is inconsistent with the running application code? Aside from blue/green deployment, how else are others managing it?
I think someone can get really far with tutorials like . Keep it simple, learn along the way, and spend more time solving customer/user problems than preoptimizing for problems that are years away
$35818/mo 💸
This is how much
@levelsio
would pay if he'd migrate to Vercel today.
I even excluded:
- Some extra shit Vercel is charging for ()
- A serverless SQL database
- A serverless Redis
- Object storage
☝️This or a $120/mo VPS on Hetzner.
For the last 10 years, I've managed servers for
@levelsio
(Nomad List, Remote OK + PhotoAI), Ghost and many others.
I've learnt a lot, and met a bunch of helpful people, so I thought it'd be nice to have a community dedicated to server problems:
⚙️
Post
That's the other thing; these pricing pages are so complex and unparseable I cannot even figure out what my expected costs would be.
Merchants of complexity?
⚡ Another successful site optimization with a 78% reduction in the time-to-first-byte and a 66% reduction in total page load time.
👋 Get in contact if you'd like your site to be faster!
Staying consistent has been the key to improving my cardio fitness in the last few months. I'm currently training to run a PB at Amsterdam Marathon. Throughout August, I ran all but 4 days, and hit new weekly distance PBs twice and running 426km in total.
There were certainly
One of my favorite things about working at Ghost is how much we ship. 31 posts in the last year, and that's just a highlight of the many other features, bug fixes and performance improvements that we ship weekly to users 🚀
💬 Just shipped: Native Comments for Ghost
This has been one of our most requested features of all time, and it's available to everyone!
Now you can build your own community, right inside Ghost.
All the details & story of how/why we built this, here: