Marcus Webb

Before going independent, Marcus Webb spent over a decade running Linux infrastructure at a fintech company in Edinburgh — the kind of environment where an unpatched server isn't a theoretical risk, it's a compliance failure and a phone call from the CEO at 2 a.m. He's administered everything from tiny £4/month VPS instances to bare-metal clusters handling payment processing for hundreds of thousands of transactions a day.

He holds Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and CompTIA Linux+ certifications, though he'll be the first to tell you that the most useful things he knows came from incidents, not exams. He's rebuilt servers from scratch after ransomware attacks, debugged Nginx configurations that caused cascading failures, and spent more weekends than he'd like to admit hunting down memory leaks in production.

These days Marcus consults independently for companies who want someone to audit their hosting setup honestly — not to sell them a managed service, but to tell them what's actually exposed and why. His writing at CompareVPS focuses on the practical side of server management: SSH hardening, firewall configuration, setting up monitoring that actually alerts you before users notice, and the security basics that a surprising number of people running production servers still haven't done.

He writes the way he talks: directly, without hedging, and with specific commands rather than vague descriptions. If you're looking for someone to validate whatever you've already set up, his articles are probably not for you.