Writing

Engineering notes, post-mortems, and the occasional argument about pricing

No listicles and no guest posts. Every article here was written by somebody who did the work, including the ones where the work went badly.

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Featured

Start with these two

The most-read piece on how we benchmark, and the runbook from our largest bulk migration to date.

PerformanceAug 12, 20269 min

TTFB is the only hosting benchmark that survives contact with reality

Every host publishes a synthetic speed score. Almost none publish time to first byte from a cold cache, because that is the number that exposes oversold hardware.

Priya Raghavan

Principal engineer, platform

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EngineeringJul 30, 202612 min

Migrating 340 WordPress sites in a weekend, without a single support ticket

An agency moved their entire client book to us over 48 hours. Here is the runbook we used, including the two things that went wrong and how we caught them before the client did.

Tom Aldridge

Migrations lead

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Everything

All articles

Filter by category. Post-mortems are the ones where we explain something we broke.

PerformanceAug 12, 20269 min

TTFB is the only hosting benchmark that survives contact with reality

Every host publishes a synthetic speed score. Almost none publish time to first byte from a cold cache, because that is the number that exposes oversold hardware.

Priya Raghavan

Principal engineer, platform

EngineeringJul 30, 202612 min

Migrating 340 WordPress sites in a weekend, without a single support ticket

An agency moved their entire client book to us over 48 hours. Here is the runbook we used, including the two things that went wrong and how we caught them before the client did.

Tom Aldridge

Migrations lead

Post-mortemJul 28, 20267 min

Post-mortem: 41 minutes of dashboard login failures

A schema migration took a lock on the session store under production write load. No hosted site was affected, but 8% of accounts could not log in. Here is exactly what happened.

Marcus Oyelaran

Director of engineering

CompanyJul 9, 20266 min

Why we print the renewal price next to the intro price

The $2.95 sticker and the $14.95 invoice are the same business model. We decided in 2023 to put both numbers on the card, and it has built trust with customers ever since.

Dana Whitfield

Co-founder

SecurityJun 21, 202610 min

How we stop one compromised site from reaching its neighbours

Shared hosting has a bad security reputation for a good reason. Here is the isolation model we use, and the three attacks it is specifically designed to stop.

Priya Raghavan

Principal engineer, platform

GuidesJun 2, 20268 min

When a VPS beats bare metal, and when it does not

We sell both, and we would rather you bought the cheaper one that fits. A decision guide with the four thresholds that actually matter.

Marcus Oyelaran

Director of engineering

PerformanceMay 14, 20267 min

We turned on HTTP/3 everywhere. Here is what actually got faster.

QUIC is a real improvement on bad networks and a rounding error on good ones. The measurements, broken down by connection quality rather than averaged into meaninglessness.

Priya Raghavan

Principal engineer, platform

EngineeringApr 27, 20266 min

A backup you have never restored is not a backup

We restore a random customer backup to a throwaway environment every hour and diff it against production. In eighteen months that has caught nine silent failures.

Tom Aldridge

Migrations lead

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