ABOUT
What Cold Spare is, and what this domain used to be
A cold spare is the machine you keep on the shelf, unplugged, for the day the running one dies. This site is about the unglamorous half of running your own infrastructure: the backups, the restores, the settings that decide whether a power cut costs you an afternoon or a year of photos.
What gets published here
One kind of article: a question a home-server owner actually has to answer, settled by running the thing rather than by summarising what other pages say about it.
Every measurement page carries four things — the question, the exact script that produced the numbers, the machine and corpus they were produced on, and the raw output. If you disagree with a conclusion you can rerun the script and argue with the data. The scripts and the raw JSON are on the raw data page; nothing is summarised behind a claim you cannot check.
What does not get published: roundups, "best of" lists, news, anything assembled from other people's articles, and anything published to fill a schedule. If there is no measurement worth running in a given month, nothing goes up that month.
Who writes it
Articles are written by Mikhaila Molina, who is named and contactable on every page and on LinkedIn. There is no house byline and no anonymous "editorial team".
How the work is produced, including the automation
Google asks publishers to be open about how automation is used, and the honest answer here is that it is used, in a specific and limited way:
- The measurements are not automated writing. They are ordinary programs — the ones published on the raw data page — executed on a stated machine, and the numbers in the articles are read directly out of their output.
- The prose is drafted with the help of a large language model, working from those results and from the primary documentation, and is then checked and edited by a human before it goes up. Every factual claim is either a number from a published run or a citation to a primary source: a specification, a manual, or a vendor's own documentation.
- Nothing here is generated at scale. There is no CMS, no content queue, no automatic publishing, and no plan to publish a fixed number of pages per week.
That combination is the point: a model can produce plausible prose about compression ratios all day, but it cannot produce the ratio your data actually gets. The measurement is the part that is hard to fake, so the measurement is the part this site is built around.
How it is funded
It is not. There is no advertising, no affiliate programme, no sponsored posts, no paid placements, no guest posts, and no links sold, exchanged, or accepted in exchange for anything. Nothing on this site is for sale. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it changes anywhere else.
Corrections
Mistakes get fixed in place, and the page's revision date is updated when they are. If a measurement turns out to have been run wrongly, the article says so rather than quietly acquiring better numbers. Corrections and disagreements go to hello@iotlinefair.com.
The history of this domain, in full
The site is called Cold Spare and the domain is called iotlinefair.com. Those do not match, and the reason is worth stating plainly rather than leaving a visitor to wonder.
This domain has had three occupants. Only the third is us.
- 2015–2019 — IoT Line Fair. A student-organised technology fair run by the EESTEC local committee at Istanbul Technical University. A real event, with no connection whatsoever to this site. We do not claim its name, its history, or its reputation, and the publication is deliberately not named after the domain for that reason.
- 2022–2024 — bulk spam. After that registration lapsed, a different holder filled the domain with machine-generated pages: online casino and betting promotions, deposit-bonus pages, payday loan pitches, dating sign-ups and essay-writing offers, across nine languages. Public web archives hold more than a thousand such URLs from that period. None of it exists here now; every one of those URLs returns 404.
- 2026 — this site. The domain was deleted, released, and registered fresh from the registry on 5 August 2026.
The consequence of that second period is still live: the domain carries a manual spam action in Google Search, applied one day after the current owner verified it. We are stating that here rather than hoping nobody notices. It is being appealed, the appeal may not succeed, and the site is being built as though it will not — because a site that is only worth running when it ranks was never worth running.
What that history means in practice: if you found a page from this domain in an archive, a link list, or an old bookmark, it was almost certainly not written by us.
How the site is served
Pre-built static HTML files on Vercel. There is no server-side code, no database behind the pages, no user agent detection, and therefore no possibility of showing search engines anything different from what you are reading. The one interactive page, the backup window calculator, runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.
No trackers, no analytics scripts, no cookies, no fonts or scripts loaded from anywhere except Google Fonts for the typefaces.