OVH has a public cloud offering, based on OpenStack, with an excellent price-performance ratio. With data centers in Europe and Canada, they are a great choice for standard compute, networking and storage needs. But there’s a catch: you absolutely must tighten security up.

I had a few VMs configured with ssmtp to relay a small number of emails, usually from cron jobs. Unfortunately, this project is no longer maintained so it’s unfit for production, and while Postfix is a solid piece of software, I was looking for something very lightweigth.

A service I manage relies on a third party which still doesn’t provide HTTPS. Their endpoint sometimes shows excessive latency as well (>700ms TTFB). Unfortunately, this service isn’t trivial to replace (aviation charts), and building our own alternative is out of the question at the moment.

I am a big fan of Blackfire, the PHP profiler from Sensio Labs. It is very easy to install and comes with a handy GUI. In the past, tooling such as XDebug + CacheGrind was so tedious that we usually kept profilers for larger projects with critical performance implications.