Thoughts, tutorials, and insights from the trenches.
Nextcloud's default install technically works. But a handful of specific settings around cron, caching, and upload limits separate 'it runs' from 'it runs well enough that people actually use it.'
OpenLiteSpeed is pitched hard in WordPress hosting circles as the undeniably faster option. Whether that outweighs Nginx's sheer ubiquity depends on who else has to work on the server.
'Our site is slow, can you look at it?' is one of the most common requests I get. Almost every single time, the fix is the exact same handful of things in the exact same order. Server-side first, frontend plugins absolutely last.
Every DNS zone I inherit has a handful of records nobody can explain and is missing one or two that actually matter. Here is the short list I check first.
The mail server software is the absolute easy part. The reason self-hosted email ends up in spam folders almost always comes down to four specific DNS records and a sending reputation that takes actual time to build.