Welcome to HowToShipIt — practical how-to guides for developers: code, AI tools, and servers, explained step by step.
Your VPS will fail. Not maybe — when. A bad kernel update, a corrupted disk, an rm -rf in the wrong terminal, or your provider losing a rack. If your only plan is “the host takes snapshots,” you don’t have a backup strategy — you have hope. This guide shows you how to set up … Read more
Session affinity used to cost money. Not any more. For years, the nginx sticky directive sat behind a paywall. If you wanted cookie-based session affinity — requests from one client consistently landing on the same backend server — you either paid for NGINX Plus or compiled a third-party module from source. Then, on 10 March … Read more
If you are hosting a side project in 2026, the AWS vs Hetzner debate is probably the single biggest money decision you will make. The raw numbers are not close: a small virtual machine that costs you a few dollars a month on Hetzner can run into dozens of dollars on AWS for equivalent hardware. … Read more
Your site was fine ten minutes ago. Now every page returns 502 Bad Gateway and your heart rate is doing the same thing as your error log. Take a breath: a 502 Bad Gateway on Nginx is one of the most debuggable errors in all of server land, because the error message is telling you … Read more
Most tutorials that teach you how to deploy Laravel with Docker are frozen in 2023: they still use the old docker-compose v1 syntax, pin PHP 8.2, and show a dev-only setup with bind-mounted code that would never survive production. In this guide you will build a production-ready Docker setup for a real Laravel app from … Read more
An Nginx reverse proxy for Node.js is the standard way to put a production Node app on the internet. Your Node app listens on a private port like 3000, and Nginx faces the world on ports 80 and 443, forwarding traffic inward. This setup gives you free SSL termination, fast static file serving, working WebSockets, … Read more
Introduction: How to Set Up a VPS with Ubuntu, Nginx and SSL This guide walks you through how to set up a VPS with Ubuntu, Nginx, and SSL — from an empty virtual server to a live, HTTPS-secured website. By the end, your server will be hardened with SSH keys and a firewall, serving your … Read more