The UPS that paid for itself

Thursday, 9 July 2026

A brief power cut used to mean a hard shutdown and, twice, a corrupted database. A small UPS and a line of config to shut down cleanly on battery ended that entirely.

The battery does not need to run the server for long. It needs to bridge the short cuts and give a clean shutdown on the long ones. A cheap unit does both.

It paid for itself the first time a two-second flicker passed without the server even noticing, let alone losing a database.