An SLA that promises response time promises nothing
The claim Nearly every IT support agreement in this market is written around response time. A one-hour response commitment is satisfied by an automated ticket acknowledgement. It o...
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Insights & tutorials
Engineering notes, infrastructure deep dives and practical guides from the Exotecho team.
Images, not JavaScript, are what your pages weigh
The claim On a typical content or commerce site, images account for the majority of transferred bytes — usually 55% to 75% — and the fix is a build step you configure once, not a f...
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Four alerts that wake someone up, and nothing else
The claim If more than four conditions in your system are permitted to page a human at three in the morning, none of them will be taken seriously by March. Alert fatigue is not a d...
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Ship every schema change as two deploys
The claim A migration that changes the shape of a table and the code that reads it in the same deploy cannot be rolled back. During the seconds or minutes when old and new applicat...
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Fixed-price web projects punish the client who learns
The claim A fixed-price software contract does not remove your risk. It sells you the risk back at a markup and then charges you again, through change orders, every time you learn...
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DMARC at p=none is not email authentication
The claim A published DMARC record with a policy of none protects nobody. It asks receiving mail servers to report on forged mail and then deliver it anyway. Most Canadian business...
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Your health check should touch the database
The claim An endpoint that returns 200 unconditionally is worse than having no health check at all. It converts a loud failure into a silent one: your load balancer keeps routing t...
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A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis
The claim Backup coverage is the wrong metric. The only number that describes your actual risk is the elapsed time of your last successful, verified restore into a clean environmen...
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Use Postgres full-text search before you reach for a search cluster
The claim Below roughly a million searchable rows, PostgreSQL's built-in full-text search is not a stopgap. It is the correct answer, and adding a separate search cluster at that s...
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