A firewall decides which network ports on your VPS the outside world can reach. Without one, every service you start — a database, a stray dev server, a debugging tool — is exposed to the entire internet the instant it binds to a public interface. Ubuntu ships with UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall), a friendly front end to …

Hardening SSH with keys stops password attacks from succeeding, but the attempts keep coming — bots will hammer your server thousands of times a day regardless. Fail2ban turns that noise into action: it watches your log files, spots the pattern of repeated failures from a single IP, and tells the firewall to ban that …

Most services on a Linux VPS run with far more power than they need. A web app that only has to read its own files and listen on a port often runs able to write anywhere on the filesystem, see every other process's temp files, and acquire new privileges at will. If that service is ever compromised, all of that latent …

A small VPS — 1 or 2 GB of RAM, a couple of vCPUs — ships with kernel defaults tuned for a generic desktop or a large server, neither of which describes your box. A handful of sysctl and limit adjustments can make that same hardware noticeably more responsive under load: less needless swapping, more simultaneous …

Running a VPN on a Linux server is a different problem than running one on a laptop. You need a proper CLI client that works headless, a protocol that holds up under long uptime, a kill switch that actually blocks traffic when the tunnel drops, and ideally some way to build a private network between multiple servers …

NordVPN is one of the few mainstream VPN providers that has put real engineering effort into its Linux client. The CLI is full-featured, the NordLynx protocol (WireGuard-based) runs efficiently on server hardware, and the Meshnet private networking feature addresses a use case that most VPN providers don't touch. If …

Running a VPN on a VPS isn't just for privacy — it's useful for securing outbound traffic, routing through a different exit node for region-sensitive services, and building private networks between servers using NordVPN's Meshnet feature. This guide covers installing NordVPN on an Ubuntu 22.04 server, configuring it …