Field notes on hosting, DNS, monitoring, backups, and the foundational technology that nobody talks about until it breaks.
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.
