VPS Hosting

Choosing the Right VPS Plan How each resource fails when exhausted, why storage type matters more than size, and why to start smaller than you think. Connecting to Your VPS via SSH Connecting to a VPS, switching to key authentication safely, and keeping long jobs alive across disconnections. How to Choose a Linux Distribution for Hosting Panel support, lifetime, the two families, stable versus current packages, minimal installs, and upgrading versus rebuilding. How to Move from Shared Hosting to a VPS Moving for the right reason, managed versus unmanaged, sizing from measurement, and why mail should stay elsewhere. Installing an Operating System on VPS Choosing a distribution for a server, what reinstalling erases, and what to do before the machine is found by scanners. Introduction to VPS Hosting What a VPS gives you, what it costs in ongoing work, and when moving up is genuinely the right call. Understanding KVM Virtualization How KVM differs from shared hosting and from a dedicated server, and what virtualisation does not give you.

How to Configure a Firewall Without Locking Yourself Out Everybody locks themselves out of a server once. The techniques that prevent it take a minute and turn an irreversible mistake into an automatic recov... How to Manage Users and Sudo Access on a VPS Creating a user with sudo, disabling root and password login, restricting sudo, service accounts, and removing people properly. How to Set Up Automatic Security Updates Configuring it, making it report, handling reboots and service restarts, pinning, and what it does not cover. How to Use SSH Config, Jump Hosts and Key Agents Most people use SSH by pasting a long command from a note. A short config file replaces all of it, and makes reaching a server behind another one a si... Securing Your VPS: Best Practices The five changes that remove most VPS risk, in order, plus the layer that assumes the others failed. Setting Up Fail2ban on a VPS Installing fail2ban correctly, verifying detection, choosing ban times, and where it sits relative to key-based authentication. Setting Up Let's Encrypt Certificates on a VPS Issuing certificates with certbot on a VPS, why issuance fails, and confirming automatic renewal actually runs.

How to Deploy a Site with Git on a VPS Pull versus push, deploy keys, what stays out of the repository, atomic switches, and keeping a rollback that works. How to Run an Application as a systemd Service Anything that must keep running belongs to the init system rather than to your terminal session. The unit file is short, and three of its settings pre... How to Set Up a Staging Environment on a VPS Same server or separate, keeping it private, disabling mail and gateways, refreshing safely, and pushing back. How to Tune MySQL or MariaDB on a Small VPS Measuring first, the two settings that matter, finding slow queries, indexes over configuration, and what tuning cannot fix. Managing Databases on VPS Running your own database safely: binding it correctly, sizing it for the machine, and backing it up in a way that restores. Running Docker on a VPS What containers genuinely solve on a VPS, the two exposures people do not expect, and when not to use them at all. Setting Up Nginx as a Reverse Proxy Why a proxy rather than port 80, the minimum config, WebSockets, static files, and reading 502 versus 504. Setting Up VPS for E mail Services What self-hosted mail actually requires, why deliverability is the difficulty, and when application-only sending is enough. Setting Up Web Applications on VPS A working order for deploying a web application on a VPS, with database privileges and file ownership done properly.

How to Add or Resize a Disk on a VPS A resized VPS disk shows the old size until two more things are done. Knowing that in advance turns a confusing afternoon into five minutes. How to Configure Swap and Memory on a VPS Creating swap correctly, swappiness, reading memory output honestly, and reducing what consumes it. Managing VPS Resources and Monitoring Performance Reading CPU, memory and disk on a VPS, why the memory number people watch is the wrong one, and what to alert on. Scaling and Upgrading Your VPS Deciding what to add and whether to add anything, scaling up against out, and the config limits a resize does not change. Understanding Inodes and Running Out of Them An account can run out of files while having gigabytes free. Every error it produces says the disk is full, and every check of the disk says it is not... Understanding Load Average and CPU Steal Load average is quoted constantly and understood rarely. It counts more than CPU work, which is why the same number means opposite things on different...

Backing Up and Restoring Your VPS Snapshots versus backups, what actually needs copying, getting it off the machine, retention, and measuring the restore. How to Manage Logs and Log Rotation on a VPS Journal versus files, capping both, writing a logrotate config that works, finding what is large, and how long to keep them. How to Schedule Jobs with Cron and Systemd Timers Writing cron entries that work, capturing failures, what systemd timers add, locking, timezones, and finding what is already scheduled. How to Use rsync for Transfers and Backups rsync is the right tool for moving a site between servers and for backups that run repeatedly. Two details. The trailing slash and the delete flag: ac... Why a Server Clock Matters and How to Keep It Right Clock drift produces a set of faults that look unrelated and share one cause. It is trivial to fix and almost never suspected, which is why it costs s...

Common VPS Hosting Issues and How to Troubleshoot Them A diagnostic order for the four kinds of VPS failure, and what to gather before opening a ticket. How to Diagnose a Server That Will Not Boot When SSH stops answering there is no way in and no information, unless you use the console, which most people forget exists until they need it.