Deep Dives

Deep Dives Jun 11, 2026

Post2Host: When You Paid for Web Hosting in Forum Posts

For a decade a corner of the web ran on a strange currency. You did not pay for hosting with money, you paid with forum posts. The story of the Post2Host era, from StoneRocket to its quiet end.

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#web hosting history #post2host #free web hosting #forums

Deep Dives Jun 10, 2026

The Day OVH Burned Down

In March 2021 an OVH data centre in Strasbourg burned to the ground overnight, taking fourteen thousand servers and millions of websites with it. The night the cloud caught fire, and the lessons written in the ashes.

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#data center #industry #ovh #backups #outages

Deep Dives Jun 9, 2026

How Tiny Islands Got Rich From Two Letters

Tuvalu owns .tv, Anguilla owns .ai, and an accident of the alphabet has funnelled tens of millions of dollars to some of the smallest places on earth. The strange economics of country-code domains.

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#ccTLD #industry #domain names #dot ai #dot io

Deep Dives Jun 8, 2026

The "Unlimited" Hosting Lie, and the Limits Hiding in the Fine Print

Unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited everything. It is the most quietly dishonest word in hosting, and the real limits are written down, just not on the page that sold you the plan.

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#shared hosting #industry #unlimited hosting #web hosting myths

Deep Dives Jun 6, 2026

The Next Big Thing in Hosting That Never Took Off

Clever ideas that were going to replace web hosting, from home servers to the blockchain web, and the unglamorous reasons convenience beat them every time.

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#industry #web hosting trends #decentralised web #opinion

Deep Dives Jun 4, 2026

The Great cPanel Revolt of 2019

For two decades cPanel ran a huge share of the web from behind the scenes, taken for granted like electricity. Then its new owners changed the pricing, and the industry discovered how much it depended on it.

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#reseller hosting #cpanel #control panel #hosting industry

Deep Dives Jun 3, 2026

Bond-Villain Data Centres: Servers in Bunkers, Silos and the Sea

Most data centres are deliberately boring grey sheds. A few sit inside nuclear bunkers, missile silos, mountains and on the sea floor, and look like the lair of a film villain. The theatrics are mostly practical.

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#data center #infrastructure #oddities

Deep Dives Jun 1, 2026

The Most Expensive Typo in History

In 2017 one mistyped command at Amazon took a huge slice of the internet offline for four hours, and the status page meant to report it was down too, because it ran on the very service that had failed.

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#cloud #AWS #resilience #outages

Deep Dives May 31, 2026

The Email That Could Not Travel More Than 500 Miles

A department head reported, in all seriousness, that they could not send email more than 500 miles. It sounded like nonsense. It turned out to be exactly, measurably true. The best war story in IT.

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#sysadmin #email #tech folklore #smtp

Deep Dives May 29, 2026

The Web Hosting Niches You Did Not Know Existed

Hosting is less a single product than a family of specialists, from game servers tuned for milliseconds to hosting built for autonomous AI agents.

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#web hosting niches #managed wordpress #game hosting #reseller hosting

Deep Dives May 26, 2026

The Great Domain Gold Rush of the 1990s

For a few wild years a handful of letters and a dot could be worth more than a house, and the companies whose names were on the line mostly slept through the start of it. The 1990s domain name gold rush.

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#domain investing #domain names #internet history #dot com

Deep Dives May 24, 2026

The Morris Worm: The Night the Internet First Fell Over

In November 1988 a single program written by a graduate student spread until a tenth of the internet ground to a halt. The night the network lost its innocence and computer security was born.

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#security #outages #internet history #morris worm