Blog
The CheapServ blog
Guides, benchmarks and plain explanations from the people who run the racks. New posts most weeks.
Latest posts
SecurityHow to rent a server without KYC: a practical privacy checklistTen steps from the e-mail address to the reverse DNS, the difference between card-free, no-KYC and unlinkable, and an honest list of what any host can still see.
EngineeringHow we deliver a dedicated server in under 60 secondsPre-racked inventory, automated imaging and honest stock counts: the mechanics behind bare metal that is online before your coffee.
ComparisonsVPS, dedicated or GPU: which server do you actually need?A sizing guide with real workloads: where a $7 VPS is plenty, where bare metal pays for itself, and when a GPU is the only honest answer.
SecurityThe first hour on a new Ubuntu VPS: a hardening checklistKeys only, a firewall that defaults to deny, automatic patches and a few kernel knobs: the twelve steps we wish everyone did before deploying anything.
GPU & AIServing an open-weight LLM with vLLM on an H100From a bare Ubuntu image to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint for Llama 3.1 70B in FP8, with the flags that matter and the throughput we measured.
Billing & cryptoPaying with Monero: what happens between your wallet and your balanceSubaddresses, the ten-block rule, why an XMR deposit shows “confirming” for about twenty minutes and what to do if you sent slightly too little.
GuidesA WireGuard hub for your whole team on a $3 VPSA hub-and-spoke VPN with per-device keys, split tunnelling and IPv6, in twenty lines of config and one systemd unit.
NetworkHow our DDoS mitigation actually worksFlow telemetry, scrubbing capacity in every hub, what “always on” means for your latency and the attacks we cannot absorb for you.
NetworkChoosing a location: the latency numbers that matterRound-trip times from each of our six sites to the places your users are, and a simple rule for picking one when they are everywhere.
SecurityWindows RDP servers: the settings that stop most brute forceNLA, account lockout, a non-default port that actually helps, and the firewall rule that limits RDP to your own address.
GuidesRunning Docker Compose in production on a VPS without regretsRestart policies, log rotation, resource limits, a reverse proxy with automatic TLS and a two-line backup of your volumes.
EngineeringNVMe on every plan: benchmarks against SATA and why databases carefio numbers from our fleet: random 4k IOPS, latency percentiles and what they mean for PostgreSQL, MySQL and a busy Redis. Deploy your first server in under a minute.
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