Laravel Deployment & Server Management Blog

Enabling HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 for Your Laravel App: A Practical Nginx Guide

HTTP/3 now carries roughly a third of web traffic. Learn how to enable HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 for Laravel with nginx on Ubuntu 24.04: the new http2 directive, QUIC on UDP 443, Alt-Svc discovery, firewall rules, and honest guidance on what gains to expect.

Sameh Elhawary · Sep 19, 2026 · 21 min read

Self-Hosting Next.js in 2026: The Complete VPS Guide for Teams Leaving Vercel

A $6-14/month VPS can now run production Next.js with zero-downtime deploys. Here's the complete migration guide: standalone builds, nginx, ISR caching, atomic releases, and what you honestly give up when you leave Vercel.

Sameh Elhawary · Sep 17, 2026 · 22 min read

Expand-and-Contract: Safe Database Migrations for Zero-Downtime Laravel Deploys

A renamed column can 500 your Laravel app for 40 seconds even with zero-downtime deploys. Learn the expand-and-contract pattern: dual writes, chunked backfills, and contract releases, with real migration code for MySQL and Postgres.

Sameh Elhawary · Sep 15, 2026 · 22 min read

Do You Need Laravel Horizon? Plain Workers vs. Horizon in Production

Horizon or plain queue:work? We break down what Supervisor-managed workers already give you, what Horizon actually adds, the three questions that decide it, and production configs for both. A real verdict framework for Laravel teams, not hand-waving.

Sameh Elhawary · Sep 13, 2026 · 19 min read

Migrating a Laravel App From MySQL to PostgreSQL: A Practical Guide

A step-by-step runbook for moving a production Laravel app from MySQL to PostgreSQL: pre-flight audits, pgloader schema conversion, dialect fixes, cutover strategies, verification queries, and when to abort. Written for engineers who need it to go right the first time.

Sameh Elhawary · Sep 11, 2026 · 20 min read

Database Connection Pooling for Laravel: When You Need It and How to Set It Up

PostgreSQL defaults to 100 connections

Sameh Elhawary · Sep 09, 2026 · 22 min read

Configuring Valkey Persistence: RDB vs. AOF for Laravel Caching, Sessions, and Queues

RDB, AOF, or hybrid? Most Laravel teams never consciously choose Valkey persistence, until a reboot empties their queue. Here's how each mode works, what each Laravel workload actually needs, and the exact valkey.conf directives to use, with Valkey 9.1 pushing ~2.1M requests/second.

Sameh Elhawary · Sep 07, 2026 · 20 min read

SOC 2 for a Laravel SaaS: What Infrastructure Evidence You'll Actually Need

SOC 2 explained for Laravel engineers: which infrastructure evidence auditors actually request, how a VPS-based stack produces it, Type I vs Type II strategy, and realistic timelines. Type II means proving controls worked over a 3-12 month window, not just claiming they exist.

Sameh Elhawary · Sep 05, 2026 · 22 min read

DigitalOcean vs. Vultr vs. Linode for Laravel: A Price and Performance Breakdown

DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode compared for Laravel hosting in 2026: entry plans from $4/month, the 4GB production tier where most apps live, hidden egress and snapshot costs, managed database math, region coverage, and honest per-use-case verdicts from a team that runs all three.

Sameh Elhawary · Sep 03, 2026 · 22 min read

Migrating From Laravel Vapor to Deploynix: Trading Serverless for Servers

Vapor is brilliant until your traffic goes steady and the Lambda bill stops making sense. A practical migration guide: mapping Vapor concepts to servers, draining SQS safely, cutting over DNS, and a worked cost example showing where the savings come from.

Sameh Elhawary · Aug 27, 2026 · 20 min read

ARM vs. x86 Servers for Laravel: Should You Switch in 2026?

Hetzner's ARM servers cost roughly 26% less than their x86 twins for identical vCPU and RAM. We break down what that gap means for Laravel: single-thread speed per request, PHP-FPM concurrency, arm64 compatibility in 2026, and a safe blue/green migration path.

Sameh Elhawary · Aug 23, 2026 · 19 min read

Migrating From Heroku to Deploynix: A Cost and Control Upgrade for Laravel

A step-by-step runbook for moving a Laravel app off Heroku: concept mapping, pg_dump migration, queue workers, DNS cutover, and a worked cost example showing a $115/month Heroku stack replaced by a $12-24 VPS.

Sameh Elhawary · Aug 21, 2026 · 18 min read