Field notes on hosting, DNS, monitoring, backups, and the foundational technology that nobody talks about until it breaks.
It looks cleaner to put everything on one cloud. The total bill is rarely smaller, and the failure mode is now correlated.
When email stops, when the site goes down, when SSO mysteriously fails — there's a better-than-even chance the root cause is a DNS record nobody is paying attention to.
Most monitoring projects fail the same way: every metric, no priorities, no signal. The fix is fewer alerts, ruthlessly tuned.
The script broke 11 months ago. The daily success email kept arriving. The backup file is 4 bytes. We've seen this exact thing more than once.
Boring tech has a quiet superpower: when something breaks at 2 AM, somebody else has already hit your problem and written down the fix.
