Everything we know about running these machines

Six categories and 24 planned articles, each with the time it will take to read. None of them are written yet: the article links open the customer panel.

API reference Ask support instead

Articles: Not yet
Categories: 6
Article links: Customer panel
API reference: Separate

The index

Six categories, and how long each page takes

The reading time sits next to every link because “how long will this take me” is the question that decides whether you click. Hiding it does not make anyone read more.

First steps 4

From the credentials email to a machine that is yours.

Your first five minutes on a new server4 min SSH keys, and turning off password login6 min Choosing and installing an image or ISO5 min Resizing a plan without rebuilding3 min

Networking 4

Addresses, ports, and what makes mail deliverable.

Configuring your IPv4 and IPv6 addresses5 min Requesting a /29 and routing it4 min Reverse DNS, and why your mail bounces without it7 min Reading a traceroute before you open a ticket9 min

Hardening 4

For a host that is publicly reachable within the hour.

A firewall that will not lock you out8 min Unattended upgrades without surprise reboots6 min Full-disk encryption on a remote machine11 min Fail2ban, and its limits5 min

Storage and backup 4

Snapshots, volumes, and the backup that is yours to keep.

Snapshots versus backups, and why you need both5 min Growing a filesystem after a plan change4 min Off-site backup to a storage plan7 min Recovering a machine that will not boot9 min

Migration 4

Moving in with the old machine still running.

rsync migration for a live system12 min Block-level copy for an offline system8 min Moving a control panel installation10 min Cutting DNS over without downtime6 min

Platform 4

How the layer underneath your machine behaves.

Shared cores versus reserved cores, measured9 min What our DDoS filtering does to your traffic7 min Live migration, and when you will notice it5 min IPMI on a dedicated server6 min

Not finding what you need is a documentation bug, and we treat it as one — tell us from the panel what you searched for and the page gets written. That is where about half of these came from.

Three rules

Documentation is a product, not a formality

Most hosting documentation is a vendor manual with the logo changed. These three rules are what it costs to avoid that, and the third one costs us the most.

Written by the people who run it

Not by a content team, and not translated from a vendor’s manual. Every command in these pages was run on this platform before it was published.

Corrected rather than archived

A page that stops being true gets fixed, and the change is dated at the bottom. We do not keep three versions of the same instruction alive and let you guess.

No login to read anything

The entire documentation is public. You can read exactly how the platform behaves before you have an account, which is when the information is actually useful.

For machines rather than people

Everything here is also an API call

Provision, resize, rebuild, snapshot and destroy from your own code, with one token and no separate account.

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