The machines under the plan
Hosting is usually described as a cloud. This one is a rack of machines in a building in Europe. Here is what is in it.
Where it stands
One datacentre in Europe. One location, not a list of regions in a dropdown. Power arrives on two independent feeds, with UPS in between and a diesel generator behind that.
Connectivity is redundant: several transit providers plus direct peering at European exchanges. Traffic from central Europe reaches the disk without crossing an ocean, and the data never leaves the EU.
| Location | Europe |
|---|---|
| Power | two independent feeds, UPS, diesel generator |
| Connectivity | redundant, several transit providers |
| Peering | NIX.CZ |
| Cooling | redundant, temperature and humidity watched |
| Physical access | security at all hours, cameras, card access |
| Availability | 99.9% per calendar month, credited if we miss it |
Machines and software
Nothing exotic. Disks are NVMe SSD in RAID 10 and SMART is read on all of them, because the disk is the part that goes first.
In front of PHP sits nginx with HTTP/2, HTTP/3 and Brotli. It still reads .htaccess, so a site carried over from an Apache host does not need rewriting on the first day.
| Storage | NVMe SSD in RAID 10, SMART monitored |
|---|---|
| Web server | nginx, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, Brotli, .htaccess |
| PHP | PHP-FPM 5.6–8.4, OPcache, version chosen per site |
| Databases | MariaDB, phpMyAdmin, remote access, daily dumps |
| Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, ClamAV, Roundcube | |
| DNS | primary and secondary, DNSSEC |
| Addressing | IPv4 and IPv6, both on every site |
How it is kept alive
Backups run every day onto separate storage. How far back they go depends on the plan, and a single site, database or mailbox can be pulled back from the control panel without asking anyone.
| R2 10 | 7 days back |
|---|---|
| R2 50 | 14 days back |
| R2 200 | 30 days back |
DDoS is filtered at the network edge, before the traffic reaches the hosting node. It is in the price and never billed separately, whether an attack arrives or not.
Security updates go out continuously and most of them nobody notices.
What shared hosting cannot do
The machine is shared, and that has consequences we would rather write down than let you discover. There is no guaranteed slice of CPU. Your neighbour will occasionally run an import at eight in the morning.
You cannot load a kernel module, run your own kernel, or have root. PHP runs in a fixed number of processes at once: 5, 15 or 40, depending on the plan. Requests over that number wait in a queue.
If you need a fixed core, a custom kernel, a Docker daemon, a game server or a database tuned to your own my.cnf, buy a VPS somewhere. We will say so on the first email rather than after three months of complaints.
Questions about a specific application are welcome before you order: support@r2d2hosting.com