deploysmith.dev

Hosting reviews from someone who actually deploys.

I rent servers, break them on purpose, and write down what really happens. Benchmarks, migrations and honest teardowns of VPS, cloud and managed WordPress hosting - for developers, agencies and indie founders who’d rather ship than shop. Some links are affiliate links; that’s what keeps the test boxes running.

Guides· DeploySmith ·

pgBadger 13.3 on a VPS: PostgreSQL Log Analysis

Intermediate · 11 min read

pgBadger 13.3 landed on November 3, 2026,[1] and it is one of those quiet maintenance releases that is worth paying attention to if you run PostgreSQL on your own VPS. Why now, specifically? PostgreSQL 19 general availability is planned for November 19, 2026,[4] which gives you a two-week window to do something most people skip before a major upgrade: look at what your current instance is actually doing. The logs PostgreSQL already writes are the highest-signal dataset on your box - no agents, no extra daemon, just the truth about slow queries, errors and disk spills. pgBadger turns that raw log stream into a single self-contained HTML report you can open in a browser. This guide covers the full loop on Debian or Ubuntu: what is new in 13.3, installing it, configuring PostgreSQL to log what pgBadger needs, running reports by hand and by cron, and reading the sections that matter. …

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Hosting· DeploySmith ·

GPU Kubernetes in 2026: NVKE vs k3s vs Managed

Intermediate · 11 min read

NVIDIA open-sourced NVKE in preview: install it on your GPU iron and it runs a managed Kubernetes service, provisioning isolated clusters through NICo and Cluster API. We compare it against DIY k3s/kubeadm and against managed GPU clusters on DigitalOcean and Vultr - with verified prices and limits from the day this was written.…

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Hosting· DeploySmith ·

Docker Engine 29.9.3: Full Security Line

Intermediate · 11 min read

Docker Engine 29.9.3 went stable on 3 November 2026, and it carries the largest security batch of the 29.9.x line: four Engine and SwarmKit CVEs plus two BuildKit advisories.[1][2] If you have been tracking the 29.x security story you know by now that this line has been shipping steady fixes since 29.9.0 on 8 October - and this release is the one to land on today.[1] This article reworks our earlier 29.9.0 write-up into the full history of the line and gives you a practical upgrade path from 29.9.0 to 29.9.3 on a self-hosted Debian/Ubuntu VPS, with the two spots that deserve special attention: firewalld plus encrypted Swarm overlays, and worker/manager TLS certificate rotation.[2] If you are still choosing where the host lives, the digitalocean vs linode vs vultr comparison covers the entry-tier cloud choice. This upgrade is version-driven, so the distro matters more than the provider. …

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Guides· DeploySmith ·

Next.js Nov 2026 Security Release: Patch to v16.4.5

Intermediate · 12 min read

The Next.js security release is out. Vercel shipped v16.4.5 (Active LTS) and v15.5.29 (Maintenance LTS) on November 3, 2026, closing seven advisories: one high severity and six medium. If you self-host, the patched code only reaches production when you update the dependency, rebuild the standalone artifact, and restart the process. This guide maps all seven advisories to their affected surfaces, calls out the ones that matter most for a self-hosted stack in front of nginx, and walks through the exact update sequence for a standalone build under PM2.…

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Guides· DeploySmith ·

eMudhra CA Compromise: Check Your TLS Chains

Intermediate · 10 min read

Eight eMudhra intermediate CAs had their private keys compromised (CVE-2026-111943). Docker 29.9.2, Go 1.26.10/1.27.3 and the ca-certificates updates from Ubuntu, Red Hat and Debian now reject those certificate chains. This guide shows how to check that your VPS’s git, curl, Docker and Go clients actually stop trusting them - and what the check has to look at before you can call it done.…

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Guides· DeploySmith ·

CVE-2026-98432: VPS Still Vulnerable to Remote Root

Intermediate · 9 min read

CVE-2026-98432 is a remote, unauthenticated use-after-free in the Linux IPv4 TCP stack (CVSS 9.8). The upstream fix is in stable kernels from 5.10.272 through 7.3, but as of 1 November Ubuntu 22.04–26.10 and RHEL 8/9/10 have not shipped a patched kernel. A fresh uname -r does not mean you are safe - you must check the kernel against your distribution’s CVE status, apply Red Hat’s documented nftables filter in the meantime, and reboot after the update.…

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Hosting· DeploySmith ·

Serverless Postgres vs VPS+PgBouncer

Intermediate · 9 min read

Managed Postgres is the default answer for most teams. But the pricing model of serverless databases (Neon, Supabase) and managed instances (Amazon RDS) is built around compute that is billed continuously, while a self-hosted PostgreSQL on a VPS is a fixed monthly cost that does not grow with your load. At some point the curves cross. For a steady, always-on workload, a single VPS running PostgreSQL plus PgBouncer is often dramatically cheaper than a managed database of equivalent size. This is that comparison: the economics, the latency story, and a decision table to help you pick. The version hook matters: PG14 is at end of life Before the cost comparison, a note on versions, because it directly affects a self-hosted setup. …

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