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Starting an Internet Service Provider
The personal site of Chris Hacken — entrepreneur and operator who founded and sold Loop Internet. Essays and a podcast on building internet infrastructure, companies, and other hard things.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,839 posts.
Infrastructure & DevOps
Any year
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Why you should not use Google Cloud
FINAL UPDATE (25-March-2022): Because of this article, we often keep getting asked if we still use GCP and if we would recommend it to…
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Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner
A real-world production migration from DigitalOcean to Hetzner dedicated, handling 248 GB of MySQL data across 30 databases, 34 Nginx sites, GitLab EE, Neo4j, and live mobile app traffic — with zero downtime.
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Docker is weird
I decided to make my own container runtime for fun, and even though I’m still early on, I’ve learned that Docker is weird . Here’s some weird things I learned about Docker.
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Give Me Back My Monolith
It feels like we’re starting to pass the peak of the hype cycle of microservices. It’s no longer multiple times a week we now see a blog post of “How I migrated my monolith to 150 services”. Now I often hear a bit more of the counter: “I don’t hate my monolith, I just care that things stay performant”. We’ve actually…
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DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS
A couple of months ago I did a performance comparison between some of the top free DNS Resolvers available. It was just after Quad9 had…
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I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left
I was one of the very first advocates for AWS back when it was brand new - SQS, S3, EC2 SimpleDB - it was a lot smaller back then. In fact I...
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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
Let engineers learn cloud without jeopardizing their personal well-being.
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We're going to need a lot of solar panels
The team at Terraform Industries is now 11 people working towards a near term future where atmospheric CO2, much of it centuries of unpriced industrial waste, becomes the preferred default source o…
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Tailscale is pretty useful
It's probably old news for most, but I've recently started using Tailscale and wanted to share my experience with it.
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Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.
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AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go
AWS is playing Chess. Cloudflare is playing Go.
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Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out
Git repositories seem like an elegant solution for package registry data. Pull requests for governance, version history for free, distributed by design. But as registries grow, the cracks appear.
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My £4 a month server can handle 4.2M requests a day
This website is hosted on a very cheap (£4 a month) VPS. This server has 1 CPU and 2GB of RAM. The slowest part of this website can theoretically handle 4.2 million requests a day. I got these results by benchmarking by websites.
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How to turn anything into a router
I don’t like to cover “current events” very much, but the American government just revealed a truly bewildering policy effectively banning import of new consumer router models. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but if this does indeed come to pass it may be beneficial to learn how to “homebrew” a router…
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Production Twitter on one machine? 100Gbps NICs and NVMe are fast
In this post I’ll attempt the fun stunt of designing a system that could serve the full production load of Twitter with most of the features intact on a single (very powerful) machine. I’ll start by showing off a Rust prototype of the core tweet distribution data structure handling 35x full load by fitting the hot set…
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CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun
CLI agents like Claude Code make self-hosting dramatically easier and actually fun. This is the first time I would recommend it to normal software-literate people.
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How I attacked myself using Google and I ramped up a $1000 bandwidth bill
It all started with an email. From: Amazon Web Services LLC Subject: Review of your AWS Account Estimated Month to Date Billing Charges...
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I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.
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What are your most used self-hosted applications?
The list that's always growing. What are your most used self hosted applications? Here's mine.
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Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run
Google Cloud Run is the perfect deployment system for all your side projects. It is dirt cheap, fully managed serverless and scalable.
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“Let’s use Kubernetes.” Now you have eight problems
For smaller teams, Kubernetes is usually the wrong solution: too complex, too complicated, and with too much work to keep it running.
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Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs
Design differences of containers, Zones, Jails and VMs.
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This website is hosted on Bluesky
Well, not this one. But this one is! How? Let’s take a closer look at Bluesky and the AT Protocol that underpins it. Note: I communicated with the Bluesky team prior to the publishing of this post. While the functionality described is not the intended use of the application, it is known behavior and does not constitue…
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Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES
A series of unfortunate events.
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Don't use Hadoop when your data isn't that big
"So, how much experience do you have with Big Data and Hadoop?" they asked me. I told them that I use Hadoop all the time, but rarely for jobs larger than a few TB. I'm basically a big data neophite - I know the concepts, I've written code, but never at scale.
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Apt Encounters of the Third Kind
A few weeks ago an ordinary security assessment turned into an incident response whirlwind. It was definitely a first for me, and I was kindly granted permission to outline the events in this blog post. This investigation started scary but turned out be quite fun, and I hope reading it will be informative to you too…