Blog
News and notes: the relaunch, how we build it, and what running servers teaches us.
- PHP2Shell: patch PHP on your server today
Two critical PHP bugs, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, were fixed on 21 October. What's affected, what we changed, and where the step-by-step guide is.
- Web scraping on a VPS with rotating proxies
Run a Scrapy crawler on a Linux VPS on a schedule, send its requests through rotating proxies, and keep it polite enough that nobody needs to block it.
- Buying a VPS with Bitcoin: from wallet to server
How paying for a VPS with Bitcoin works, step by step, the mistakes that cause underpayments, what Bitcoin does and doesn't hide, and how refunds come back.
- One-click apps and six Linux distributions
How Rack4's one-click apps and its six Linux distributions in ten versions work, from when the app catalog was first built, and what's still unproven.
- How we keep your VPS isolated
The firewall that sits in front of every Rack4 server, what it stops your neighbours from doing, and what we still have to test.
- Inside the Rack4 panel
The account side of my.rack4.io is built. Sign-up, two-factor, SSH keys, API tokens, sessions and an activity log, and why it looks like a terminal.
- VPSNine is coming back
VPSNine sold Linux VPS from 2011. After a few quiet years it is relaunching on new NVMe hardware, operated by Tekari. Here is what is planned.
- What "59 seconds" means
Ready for SSH in under 59 seconds from a confirmed payment: what the clock covers, how we measured it on our hardware, and what isn't measured yet.
- Why there's a rack4 CLI
We built a command-line tool alongside the panel, on the same public API. What it does, why the API came first, and where to get it.
- Why we're building our own control panel
Rack4 is writing its own billing, control panel, API and CLI instead of buying them. What that gets you, what it costs us, and where it stands.