The real cost of SaaS
Every SaaS subscription is a recurring tax on your business. Google Workspace, LucidLink, monitoring tools — they add up silently. The Prachyam Infrastructure Deep Dive project proved that self-hosting can save lakhs annually.
DNS is everything
If your DNS is wrong, nothing works. SPF, DKIM, DMARC for email. Private DNS with dnsmasq for internal services. I've debugged more DNS issues than I care to admit.
Monitoring before scaling
Don't scale until you know what's slow. Instrument first, optimize second. This is why Sentry was the first thing I added to Karmpath Architecture Decisions before touching performance.
Mesh networking changed how I think about infrastructure
Tailscale turned underpowered machines into a distributed build cluster. The old model of "one big server" is dead. See Tools I Can't Live Without for the specific stack.
Backups are not optional
If you're self-hosting, backups are your responsibility. Automated nightly backups saved us twice at Prachyam. Test your restores — an untested backup is no backup at all.
The 80/20 of security
HTTPS everywhere, strong SSH keys, fail2ban, regular updates. These four things handle 80% of security concerns. The other 20% is threat modeling for your specific use case.