• Automated secured Hetzner VPS

    Introduction A few weeks ago we setup a cool VPS with WordPress, Traefik, etc. in an automated way. The only downside was that is could not be managed with the same code (only setup once), as explained in the post. Today we’re setting up a complete, automated WordPress hosting solution using OpenTofu, cloud-init and Ansible;…

  • 7 WordPress plugins I install before the theme

    Introduction Forget the “Top 50 Essential Plugins” lists. Most plugins are bloated garbage that slow your site to a crawl. After a decade of debugging sites at 3 AM, I’ve narrowed it down to seven pieces of infrastructure. These handle the invisible work, being speed, security, and not losing data. Akismet Anti-spam by Automattic –…

  • Oneshot secured Hetzner VPS

    Introduction A complete, automated WordPress hosting solution using OpenTofu, Docker, and Traefik. Deploy a secure, fast WordPress site to Hetzner Cloud in minutes with TLS, caching, and security hardening out of the box. Find the code here. Update: I’ve split the code into 3 repos, making it more scalable for future deployments. Deploy them in…

  • From platform engineer to threat hunter

    Introduction I’ve spent the last decade automating everything that moves. Turning VMs into containers, containers into orchestrated workloads, and Git repos into self-healing production platforms. I’m a Kubernetes platform engineer by trade, addicted to GitOps, service meshes, and the beautiful chaos of multi-cluster architectures. But lately? I’ve been spending more time thinking about how to…