Notes from the machine room.
How the platform is built and why it behaves the way it does, written by the people who carry the pager — plus the buying guides for everything we sell.
How the platform actually works.
Written by the people who carry the pager, about decisions you can check against the product.
Why we bill by the hour but cap by the month
Hourly billing is easy to advertise and hard to implement honestly. Here is the ledger design behind ours, and the two rounding decisions that decide whether it is fair.
Read the postWhat happens when an IP pool runs dry
A capacity check that reports headroom while provisioning fails is worse than no check at all. IPv4 allocation is the classic case, and the reason is that it is the one resource you cannot overcommit.
Read the postDisk resize without a reboot
Growing a volume used to mean a power cycle and a filesystem check. It now happens online, in about four seconds — and the reason it is safe is the order the layers are touched in.
Read the postWhy a server takes 38 seconds and not four minutes
What actually happens between clicking order and getting an SSH prompt. The short version is that nobody should be running an OS installer — and the last ten seconds are harder to remove than the first three minutes.
Read the postWhat hosting in the south actually costs you
We run two regions, both in the north and west. Here is exactly what that costs a southern visitor, which workloads notice and which do not, and when you should buy from someone else instead.
Read the postWhy port 25 is closed by default
Outbound port 25 is blocked here, and on almost every hosting provider and home ISP in the world. It is not an arbitrary restriction — it is the thing protecting your domain from someone else’s compromised WordPress install.
Read the postHow incremental snapshots work
A full snapshot of an 80 GB disk copies 80 GB every time, most of it identical to last time. Incremental snapshots copy what changed — and introduce one new problem worth understanding before you rely on them.
Read the postBuying guides: the questions that come before the buying.
Written for people running sites in India, not translated from American hosting advice.
WordPress speed optimization for an Indian audience
Most WordPress speed advice is written for an American audience on American hosting. Here is what actually moves the number when your visitors are in Delhi, Mumbai or Chennai.
Read the guideVPS vs shared hosting: which one do you actually need?
Shared hosting is the right answer far longer than hosting companies like to admit. Here is how to tell when it stops being the right answer.
Read the guideHow much RAM does a VPS actually need?
Almost every VPS is bought one size too big or one size too small. Here are the numbers, by workload, with the headroom you should leave on top.
Read the guideHow to migrate a website to a new host without downtime
Migrations go wrong in the same four places every time. Here is the order that avoids all of them — and the reason you should never let anyone delete the old host on cutover day.
Read the guideGST on web hosting in India, explained
Hosting is an 18% GST service. Whether you get that 18% back depends on things most hosting pages never mention — and on whether your host can issue an Indian tax invoice at all.
Read the guideWhat is cPanel, and do you need it?
cPanel is the control panel most Indian hosting runs on. Here is what it actually does, which parts you will use, and the case for not having it at all.
Read the guideCron jobs explained, and how to set one up
A cron job is a command your server runs on a schedule. The concept takes a minute; the five-field syntax is what trips everyone up. Here is both, plus the four reasons a cron that looks right does not run.
Read the guideIMAP, POP3 and SMTP port numbers
Six numbers, and only four of them should ever be used. Here is what each port does, which to put in your mail client, and why port 25 is closed on virtually every hosting provider in the world.
Read the guideThe fastest DNS resolvers for India
Every list of "fastest DNS" is written from somewhere else. What matters is which resolver is fastest from your connection, in your city — and that takes about two minutes to measure properly.
Read the guide.com vs .in: which domain should an Indian business buy?
The short answer is both. The useful answer is which one to put on the invoice — and that depends on where your customers are, not on which sounds more impressive.
Read the guideSupport that picks up the phone.
24×7, from our office in Agra, in IST — Hindi or English. Sales, migration and emergencies all reach the same engineers. No offshore queue, no 48-hour first reply.
Rather just ask a person?
Call +91 75994 50220 or email support@bigdomainhost.com. We answer 24×7, and we will tell you when you do not need to buy anything.