Technical articles. No filler.
IPv4 addresses ran out and one now costs over 40 dollars, while IPv6 is free and practically limitless. The safe path is dual-stack: running both protocols together with AAAA records and an ip6tables firewall, so nothing existing breaks.
HTTP/3 builds on the QUIC protocol over UDP to solve TCP head-of-line blocking. Its real gains show on flaky mobile networks, enabling it on Nginx or Cloudflare is simple, but the biggest win stays server proximity to the user.
Capacity planning means measuring a real baseline for your site, modeling monthly growth, then upgrading at 70% sustained use. Do not buy empty capacity upfront; start right-sized and add resources exactly when you need them.
Running several sites on one server saves real money, but without isolation a single heavy site can drag all the others down. The fix is three layers: a virtual host per site, a separate Linux user, and a memory-capped PHP-FPM pool per site.
Every new database connection costs memory and milliseconds to negotiate, and at hundreds of connections it devours memory and collapses. The fix is connection pooling: a small reused pool, and a proxy like PgBouncer when needed.
A well-structured monolith is the right choice for most teams under 20 developers. Microservices turn a nanosecond function call into a millisecond network call and multiply operational complexity. Decide by numbers, not fashion.
Octane with Swoole keeps the app loaded in memory, lifting throughput from hundreds to thousands of requests per second. But it opens shared-state traps, needs server setup, and sometimes OPcache and query tuning are enough.
An index turns a full scan of a million rows into a search in about 20 steps, speeding reads by tens to hundreds of times. But it slows writes, grows storage, and some indexes never fire. This guide covers EXPLAIN with real numbers.
One leaked database key in a public repo can be exploited within minutes. The fix is practical: keep .env out of Git, set file permissions to 600, rotate keys every 90 days, and scrub the history the moment a leak happens.
