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The fastest request is the one your server never sees. Get Cache-Control right, use ETags without lying, cache pages for logged-in users safely, and purge by tag instead of by URL.
Stop configuring servers by hand. Provision with Terraform, configure with Ansible, keep secrets out of state, and rebuild any environment from an empty account in under an hour.
Run your own S3-compatible storage without fooling yourself about durability: bucket policies and least privilege, presigned URLs, direct browser uploads, why a single node is not a backup, mirroring, lifecycle rules, and when a managed provider wins.
Run several Django applications on a single machine without them taking each other down: label-driven routing, automatic certificates, network and resource isolation, independent deploys, per-app backups, and knowing when one server is no longer enough.
Sending mail is easy; arriving is not. Authentication records explained properly, the alignment rule most guides omit, why fresh servers cannot send, asynchronous delivery, bounce handling, and the headers that keep you out of the spam folder.
DNS treated as the distributed system it is: which records matter, what TTL really controls, why propagation is the wrong word, negative caching, CAA to restrict certificate issuance, and how to move a domain without a gap in service.
Everything a Django deployment needs to survive losing a server: consistent database dumps, media and secrets, encrypted offsite copies with restic, retention that survives ransomware, point-in-time recovery, and the restore drill nobody runs.
A complete playbook for moving a running Django site to a new server: inventory, runtime parity, database and media transfer, certificates before DNS, the delta-sync window, the IPv6 trap that breaks TLS issuance, and how to keep a working fallback.
Find your breaking point before your users do: designing realistic load scenarios, driving them with Locust or k6, reading the latency percentiles that matter, locating the true bottleneck, and turning results into capacity plans and autoscaling signals.
Move Django file storage off local disk: django-storages with S3-compatible object storage, private files via signed URLs, direct browser uploads with presigned POST, streaming large files, async image pipelines, and CDN + security pitfalls.
Stop guessing why your app is slow. Profile a live Django process without restarting it using py-spy, trace per-request queries and timings with django-silk, read flame graphs, and turn findings into concrete fixes.
Ship to production continuously without big-bang risk. Build a feature-flag layer in Django, roll features out to a percentage of users, run A/B experiments, and add instant kill switches for when something goes wrong.
These tutorials are written from real production work, and the best ideas come from readers. Got a suggestion, a correction, or a subject you keep searching for and never find properly explained? Tell us — we read every message, and requested topics move to the front of the queue.
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