How the Two Groups Work Together
Think of it like a restaurant. The live group is the dining room, where customers are served every day. The lab is the test kitchen in the back, where new recipes get tried before they go on the menu. Customers never wander into the test kitchen, and nothing half-finished reaches the dining room.
The Short Version
The Same Setup as a Big Data Center, Sized for You
I didn't come up with a cheaper shortcut for hosting websites. The design behind your site follows the playbook the large data centers use, piece for piece. They run it across warehouses for millions of customers. I run it on eight computers for a group of local businesses.
| What it is | What it does for you | What runs your site |
|---|---|---|
| Virtualization | One physical computer runs many separate, walled-off machines, so your site has its own space | Proxmox VE (KVM virtual machines and Linux containers) |
| High-availability clustering | The computers check on each other constantly. If one stops answering, the others agree it's down (quorum) and restart its work on a healthy one | Proxmox HA with corosync, two HA pairs, automatic failover |
| Replicated storage | Your site's data is copied to a second computer, and every block is checksummed so silent disk errors get caught | ZFS on every node, replicated to the partner every 2 minutes |
| Network segmentation | Separate networks for management, replication, customer sites, staging and the lab, with a firewall deciding what can talk to what | VLANs and a stateful firewall on a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 12 |
| No open doors | Nothing on my network accepts connections from the internet. Visitors reach a security provider first | Cloudflare Tunnel, zero inbound ports |
| Backups | Nightly backups that only store what changed, with a second copy on a different drive and one offsite | Proxmox Backup Server, plus an encrypted offsite copy |
| Dev, test and production | New work is built and tested away from live sites | A separate 3-node lab cluster behind the firewall |
| Monitoring | Health, storage and backups are tracked around the clock, with alerts to a person | Prometheus and Grafana, with alerts to my phone |
| Redundant internet and power | A spare connection and backup power keep things running through an outage | Two internet lines with automatic failover, battery backup and a standby generator |
What I Leave Out, and What I Add
| A big data center | RockNet Consulting | |
|---|---|---|
| Overhead | Buildings, layers of management, sales teams and call centers, all built into the price | One person, eight computers, no layers in between |
| Who you talk to | A ticket system and whoever is on shift | Me, locally. I already know your setup. |
| Who it's built for | Millions of customers, so you're an account number | Small business owners, with plans sized and priced for them |
Where size really helps, I use the big companies too: Cloudflare screens every visitor, and the offsite backup copy lives in a professional data center. The battery backup, second internet line and offsite copy are being finished before the January 2027 opening. The standby generator is in place.
Why Work With Me
Anyone can sell a product for a set price. Web hosting is no different, and plenty of companies will happily charge you every month. Fewer of them care whether what they sold you actually helps your business.
You already know the difference from your own work. You got into your trade because you're good at it and you care whether your customer walks away better off. The price is how you get paid for that. The care is why people come back and send their friends.
I'm a one-person shop in Hudson, Michigan. When you call, you get me. I know which site is yours, what we changed last month and what you're planning next. If something breaks, I fix it and tell you what happened in plain English. If a plan or tool won't help you, I'll tell you that before you buy it.
- 20+ years keeping carrier-grade networks running, where an outage is a big deal and you find the real cause
- Since 1995 a ham radio operator, which is where the habit of taking things apart started
- Installer, instructor, senior engineer: I've done the field work and the planning
- Uses AI every day, with a person checking the work. I'll show you where it saves real time and where it doesn't.