September and October were relatively quiet, so I thought I would write a single article for both months. While I'd normally try to write at least one useful article per month for OnlineOrNot's audience (as well as an update on how the business is going), I wrote no articles, and no code, actually. Instead, I packed up my life in Sydney, Australia, escaped lockdown, and relocated to France with my wife, and just enjoyed living for a while.

A few weeks before I sat down to write this article, I reshared my two month review of OnlineOrNot around the internet. Surprisingly, the article was quite popular: So I thought I'd clear up some confusion for the folks who only just read my two month review: I started OnlineOrNot on February 25, 2021, shipped the first version for people to use on March 2, 2021, and here I am in August writing the six month review.

Your engineers probably dislike going on-call for your services. Some might even dread it. It doesn't have to be this way. With a few changes to how your team runs on-call, and deals with recurring alerts, you might find your team starting to enjoy it (as unimaginable as that sounds). I wrote this article as a follow-up to Getting over on-call anxiety.

You've joined a company, or worked there a little while, and you've just now realised that you'll have to do on-call. You feel like you don't know much about how everything fits together, how are you supposed to fix it at 2am when you get paged? So you're a little nervous. Understandable. Here are a few tips to help you become less nervous.

Like all good things in infrastructure, picking whether or not to self-host your database is full of trade-offs. On the one hand, you have the absolute freedom to do whatever it is you want with your database - whether it's adding a useful Postgres extension, or experimenting with new technologies. On the other hand, you now have to dedicate resources to keeping your database reliably online.

In case you missed it, for about 15 minutes on June 8, 2021, Fastly's CDN had an outage, taking some of the internet's largest websites down (including the BBC, UK government, Reddit, and the New York Times - Amazon.com also had its CSS fail to load).

No matter where you live, if your business targets a global audience, the question of where to host your website comes up pretty often.

In case you don't remember, or missed my first article: OnlineOrNot started as a SaaS I built and shipped a v0.0.1 of in 7 days. It was an Absolute Minimal Viable Product. You couldn't even login with a password. Still can't, actually. You're probably wondering what it does. OnlineOrNot is a website monitoring service that provides both uptime, and page speed checks.

Chances are, you've run a PageSpeed Insights test and noticed "First Contentful Paint" as one of the first numbers in the report. I've covered most of the metrics before in my article on Understanding the Page Speed Metrics in Google Lighthouse, but in this article I wanted to dive deeply into First Contentful Paint - particularly what it is, what a good score is, and how to improve. Table of Contents.

You might be looking around for a new web host, or trying to get a better deal. You notice VPS plans are incredibly cheap - as low as $3-5 per month, while the cheapest shared hosting is around $10 per month. You wonder, "How is this possible?!" - especially when people recommend moving to a VPS once a site becomes popular. Let's discuss what these are first, before going into why cheaper doesn't necessarily mean better for you and your business.