DEV Community: Shannon Dias

How to Set Up a High-Performance Minecraft Server on Linux

Shannon Dias — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:45:35 +0000

If you've ever managed a Minecraft community, you know that block lag, random disconnects, and tick drops can ruin the experience. When you add heavy mods or scale your player base, cheap shared hosting quickly chokes.

The ultimate fix? Hosting a Minecraft server on Linux using a high-performance bare-metal dedicated server. By taking full control of your infrastructure, you ensure maximum uptime, dedicated resources, and ultimate customizability.

In our latest comprehensive guide, we walk you through the complete Linux Minecraft server setup.

What you will learn:

Preparing a secure Ubuntu/Debian or CentOS environment.
Installing the correct Java Runtime Environment (Java 21 for modern versions).
Creating automated start.sh scripts for RAM allocation.
Mastering the screen command for background processing.
Configuring UFW/Firewalld specifically for Minecraft (Port 25565).
Advanced optimization using PaperMC and Aikar's Flags.

Stop dealing with server lag and shared resources.

Read the full, step-by-step tutorial on Fit Servers here!

The Edge: Deploying Docker on Bare Metal vs. Virtual Machines

Shannon Dias — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:11:18 +0000

Imagine spending hours perfecting an application locally, only to have it break the moment you deploy it to your production server. If you are using standard VPS hosting, the agitation doesn't stop there. You are constantly battling the "hypervisor tax"—the invisible layer of virtualization that steals your CPU cycles and chokes your disk I/O.

By containerizing your applications and running them on a bare-metal dedicated server, you bypass the virtualization layer entirely. Because Docker doesn't need to emulate virtual hardware, you get:

100% Resource Allocation: Direct access to CPU and RAM.
Maximum Disk I/O: Crucial for containerized databases like Postgres or MySQL.
Lower Network Latency: Direct routing to the physical NIC.

We just published a comprehensive, step-by-step deployment tutorial over at Fit Servers.

What the tutorial covers:

Secure Server Prep: Configuring UFW and Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 LTS.
Official Docker Installation: Proper apt repository setup with GPG keys.
Docker Compose Architecture: Building a persistent 3-tier stack using Infrastructure as Code.
Reverse Proxying: Routing multiple domains to internal containers without port conflicts.
Resource Limiting: Enforcing CPU and memory limits inside your docker-compose.yml.

If you want to unlock true bare-metal Docker performance, check out the full guide with all the necessary CLI commands and YAML configurations.

👉 Read the full technical tutorial here

RAID Configurations Explained: Which One Fits Your Workload?

Shannon Dias — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 07:09:41 +0000

When architecting a high-performance environment, processors and RAM usually get the budget. But seasoned system administrators know that storage is almost always the primary bottleneck. If you are running a write-heavy database (like PostgreSQL or MongoDB) and your storage drives cannot feed data to the CPU fast enough, your processing power is wasted.

We just published a comprehensive guide over at Fit Servers breaking down enterprise storage configurations.

Key Takeaways from the article

Hardware vs Software RAID: Why true hardware RAID controllers with Flash-Backed Write Caches (FBWC) are mandatory for preventing database corruption during power loss.

The RAID 5 Write Penalty: Why RAID 5's XOR parity calculations can cripple write performance on DB servers.

RAID 10 Dominance: Why RAID 1+0 remains the undisputed king for enterprise virtualization and transactional databases.

NVMe + RAID: Why ultra-fast flash storage doesn't make redundancy obsolete.

If you are provisioning a new bare-metal server soon, make sure you choose the right storage foundation.

👉 Read the full technical deep-dive here

10Gbps vs 1Gbps Uplinks: The Math Behind Your Network Bottlenecks

Shannon Dias — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:23:47 +0000

Hello DEV community! 👋

How often have you seen infrastructure that looks perfectly healthy on paper—low CPU, plenty of RAM—but users are still experiencing timeouts?

The culprit is usually a saturated uplink. You can throw all the processing power in the world at a server, but if your 1Gbps port is maxed out at 125 MB/s while your NVMe drives are trying to push 3,000 MB/s, you are artificially bottlenecking your hardware.

The Tipping Point
A standard 1Gbps line is fine for internal CRM or staging environments. But you need to reconsider your architecture if you are dealing with:

High-Volume Streaming: 4K video requires ~25 Mbps per user. A 1Gbps line maxes out at roughly 40 concurrent viewers before queuing starts.

Machine Learning/Big Data: Moving terabytes between database and processing nodes requires wider pipes to keep GPUs fed.

Low-Latency SaaS: WebSocket connections and API calls suffer from packet queuing during traffic bursts on a 1Gbps line.

I just published a deep dive into the infrastructure math and the business ROI of upgrading to a 10Gbps dedicated environment.

Read the full technical guide here: [https://www.fitservers.com/blogs/10gbps-vs-1gbps-dedicated-servers-upgrade-guide/]

How to calculate dedicated server bandwidth requirements

Shannon Dias — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:12:51 +0000

If you're provisioning infrastructure, estimating bandwidth can often feel like throwing darts at a board. But over-provisioning wastes budget, and under-provisioning causes packet loss and throttling during peak loads.

The Fit Servers engineering team just published a deep dive into bandwidth calculation, and we wanted to share the core formula here.

The Base Formula for Monthly Data Transfer:
(Average Page Size in MB × Monthly Visitors × Average Pages per Visit) ÷ 1,024 = Estimated Monthly Bandwidth in GB

Example: A media-rich B2B app averaging 2.5 MB per page with 80,000 visitors viewing ~3.2 pages:
2.5 MB × 80,000 × 3.2 = 640,000 MB ÷ 1,024 ≈ 625 GB/month

Don't Forget the Peak Multiplier!
Raw averages will fail you during seasonal spikes. You need to multiply your base estimate by a peak multiplier:

Steady SaaS: 1.5×

E-commerce (Seasonal): 2.5–3×

Live Streaming: 3–5×

In our full guide, we also break down the critical architectural differences between Metered vs. Unmetered bandwidth, the reality of 95th percentile billing, and how to spot network saturation before your users do.

Read the full technical breakdown here: [https://www.fitservers.com/blogs/dedicated-server-bandwidth-guide/]

How to Install cPanel & WHM on AlmaLinux 9 or Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (2026 Guide)

Shannon Dias — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:57:46 +0000

Hey DEV community! 👋

If you are provisioning a bare-metal dedicated server for web hosting in 2026, you already know that CentOS is officially out of the picture. Getting cPanel & WHM running smoothly on modern OS options like AlmaLinux 9 or Ubuntu 24.04 LTS requires an updated set of pre-flight checks.

Relying on outdated tutorials will often result in conflicting package managers, broken dependencies, and failed installations. Since cPanel cannot be cleanly uninstalled without a complete OS wipe, you have to get it right on the first try.

We just published an in-depth, verified tutorial over at FitServers that cuts through the noise. No fluff—just the exact terminal commands and WHM GUI steps you need to get production-ready.

🛠️ What You Will Learn

Our comprehensive guide covers the entire deployment lifecycle:

OS Selection & Requirements: Why AlmaLinux 9 is the primary recommendation, and how to handle Ubuntu's specific AppArmor and NetworkManager quirks.
Pre-Installation Prep: Step-by-step commands to properly set your FQDN (hostnamectl), update core packages, and disable OS-level firewalls (firewalld or ufw) so cPanel can bind its own services.
The Installation Execution: How to safely pull and run the official installation script using a screen session:

  # Example: Starting a persistent session and running the installer
  screen -S cpanel-install
  cd /home && curl -o latest -L [https://securedownloads.cpanel.net/latest](https://securedownloads.cpanel.net/latest) && sh latest

Initial WHM Configuration: A walkthrough of the Setup Wizard, including setting up custom nameservers and provisioning Let's Encrypt certificates via AutoSSL.

Security Hardening: Essential post-install lock-downs. We detail the exact network ports you need to open on your cloud firewall and how to activate cPHulk to immediately block brute-force login attacks.

Creating Your First Account: Provisioning your first hosting package and web space.

🚀 Ready to Deploy?
Whether you are setting up your own infrastructure, migrating high-traffic client sites, or building a hosting reseller business, this guide is your definitive blueprint.

For read more, visit the tutorial link: [https://www.fitservers.com/tutorials/howto/install-cpanel-whm-on-dedicated-server/]

Reaching 3,140 Tok/s: Benchmarking the 96GB RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell

Shannon Dias — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:18:41 +0000

Fellow devs and sysadmins, the days of sharding massive models across multiple consumer GPUs just to get enough memory are coming to an end.

At Fit Servers, we've been analyzing the NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell, and the specs are heavily targeted at local AI developers and server engineers.

The Hardware
GPU Die: GB202 (Blackwell)

CUDA Cores: 24,064

VRAM: 96 GB GDDR7 ECC (1.8 TB/s bandwidth)

TDP: 600W Max (Server Edition is passive)

Why Developers Should Care: Native FP4
The biggest architectural shift is the 5th-Gen Tensor Cores with native FP4 support. A full 70B parameter model in FP4 quantization requires ~35–40 GB of VRAM. With 96GB, you have massive headroom for long context windows.

In single-GPU inference, this card hits 3,140 tokens/sec, actually edging out the H100 SXM (2,987 tok/s) because the H100 lacks native FP4 hardware paths.

The Catch
It draws 600W. You need a dedicated, full-size tower or a proper rack setup with heavy-duty power supplies to run this safely.

We’ve published the full technical spec sheet, thermal requirements, and detailed throughput benchmarks over at Fit Servers.

🔗 For read more visit the blog link and find your next server configuration: https://www.fitservers.com/blogs/nvidia-rtx-pro-6000-blackwell/

Why We Are Recommending Bare Metal Over Cloud Instances in 2026

Shannon Dias — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 10:23:31 +0000

Let’s talk infrastructure. We all love the elasticity of cloud providers, but when it comes to predictable, high-resource workloads, abstracting the hardware is starting to cost us—both in performance and on the monthly invoice.

If you are spinning up heavy database architectures, running containerized microservices, or deploying game servers, USA Dedicated Servers are offering unmatched advantages right now:

No Hypervisor Tax: You get direct access to the metal. Intel Xeon/AMD EPYC processors without the virtualization overhead.

I/O Performance: Swapping cloud block storage for dedicated NVMe arrays drastically reduces database query bottlenecks.

Full Root Control: Bring your own OS. Set your own kernel parameters. Configure your private VLANs and hardware firewalls without fighting a cloud provider's proprietary dashboard.

Cost Predictability: A flat monthly fee instead of getting crushed by bandwidth egress charges.

We just published a complete guide on how to architect and choose dedicated servers across 60+ US data centers, including strategies for peering and DDoS mitigation.

To read more and see the hardware breakdowns, visit the blog link: [https://www.fitservers.com/blogs/best-usa-dedicated-servers-for-business-and-gaming/]

How to Provision and Automate a Dedicated Rust Server on Ubuntu 🐧🎮

Shannon Dias — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:48:45 +0000

If you've ever tried running a Rust server on an underpowered VPS, you know the pain of entity desync and out-of-memory crashes. Rust is a beast—it simulates physics, AI, and building decay simultaneously. A fresh 3km map eats ~2GB of RAM, and after a few days of active raiding, you're easily pushing 12GB.

Here is a technical overview of how we provision bare-metal boxes at Fit Servers to run Rust perfectly.

The Bare-Metal Hardware Rust's main thread is heavily single-threaded. You need high clock speeds. We recommend:

CPU: Ryzen 5800X3D or i9-11900K

RAM: 24–32 GB (essential for 100+ players)

Storage: NVMe SSDs (critical for fast world saving without stuttering)

OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or 24.04 LTS

Oxide Plugins & uMod
Vanilla Rust is great, but community servers thrive on plugins. By pulling the latest Linux build of Oxide (Oxide-Rust_Linux.zip), you can drop .cs files directly into oxide/plugins/ to hot-load modifications like BetterChat or GatherManager without restarting the daemon.
Automating Wipes with Cron
Facepunch forces a wipe on the first Thursday of every month. We automate this by triggering a shell script via cron that warns players via RCON, gracefuly stops the server, randomizes the server.seed, deletes .sav files, updates via SteamCMD, and spins the tmux session back up.

To read more, visit the tutorial link: [https://www.fitservers.com/tutorials/howto/setup-a-rust-dedicated-server/]

nderstanding Australia’s Internet Backbone: Peering, Transit, and Data Center Connectivity 🇦🇺

Shannon Dias — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:39:13 +0000

When deploying applications to the APAC region, Australia is a prime choice. However, the geographic isolation of the continent means developers need to be highly conscious of their host's network topology.

If your host relies on poorly peered transit providers, your traffic might trombone across the Pacific before reaching a user in Southeast Asia.

In our latest engineering and infrastructure deep dive, we break down the major carriers operating in Australia:

Global Tier 1s in AU: NTT, Lumen, Cogent, Arelion.

Domestic Tier 2s: Telstra, Vocus Group, Optus, Superloop.

The Carrier-Neutral Architecture: Why we utilize cross-connects to bypass public internet congestion and drop latency.

If you are running real-time applications, gaming backends, or latency-sensitive enterprise workloads in the region, understanding these routing paths is crucial. At Fit Servers, we operate across 25 IX peering points to ensure traffic stays localized and fast.

Dive into the full technical guide on our blog: [https://www.fitservers.com/blogs/australias-major-bandwidth-carriers-&-data-center-connectivity/]

BGP Routing and Backbone Carriers: Architecting Low Latency in Asia 🌏💻

Shannon Dias — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 09:21:17 +0000

When deploying applications in Asia, developers often focus on the server hardware. But what about the physical network?

At Fit Servers, we spend a lot of time optimizing BGP routing tables to ensure packets take the least-congested paths. To do this, we have to leverage a complex mix of Tier 1 and Tier 2 backbone carriers.

The Carrier Landscape in APAC
If you are pushing workloads to users in Asia, here is who is handling your packets:

NTT Communications (AS2914): The benchmark for ultra-low latency in Japan.

Singtel: The undisputed cornerstone of the ASEAN internet.

Tata & Bharti Airtel: Crucial for penetrating the complex Indian domestic market.

China Telecom (CN2 GIA): The absolute gold standard for minimizing packet loss at the Chinese border.

How Fit Servers Achieves <5ms Latency
We don't rely on a single upstream provider. By operating in carrier-neutral facilities, our NOC maintains connectivity from multiple carriers. If one path drops or clogs, our routers automatically failover to an alternative transit provider. Add in active IXP peering, and we maintain a 99.99% uptime SLA.

Want to deep-dive into the technical topology of Asia's internet infrastructure?

👉 Read more by visiting the blog link: [https://www.fitservers.com/blogs/bandwidth-carriers-powering-data-centers-across-the-asia/]

The Architecture of Speed: Designing Low-Latency Infrastructure in Europe

Shannon Dias — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 09:46:58 +0000

If you're deploying demanding workloads—think real-time gaming, high-frequency trading, or intensive microservices—you already know that compute power is only half the equation. Network latency is the silent killer of user experience.

At Fit Servers, we spend a lot of time optimizing BGP routes and peering agreements. We've just published a deep dive into the physical reality of European data center connectivity.

What's inside the article:
The Big Players: A look at ASN routing giants like Arelion (AS1299), Deutsche Telekom, and Colt Technology Services.

The FLAP Ecosystem: Why Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Paris hold the densest Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) like DE-CIX and AMS-IX.

Carrier Neutrality: The architectural advantage of cross-connects and avoiding vendor lock-in at the facility level to build true redundancy.

If you are architecting a bare metal or cloud deployment in the EU and want to understand how to shave off those crucial milliseconds, check out our full breakdown.

👉 Read more on the Fit Servers Blog: [https://www.fitservers.com/blogs/navigating-europes-premier-bandwidth-carriers/]