Running your own VPN server used to mean wrestling with OpenVPN's certificate authority workflow or IPsec's famously fiddly configuration stanzas. WireGuard was built to sidestep both problems: it's a VPN protocol implemented as a small codebase that the Linux kernel has shipped as a built-in module since late 2019, …

Every shared-root server has the same origin story. One person spins up the VPS, a second needs access so they get handed the root password, a contractor joins and gets it too, and within a year nobody can say who logged in last week or who still knows the password that protects everything. When something is deleted at …

A VPS you stood up six months ago and rarely log into is the most dangerous machine you own. It is still serving traffic, still listening on its open ports, and still running whatever package versions it had the day you walked away — including the ones with public exploits published last week. Patch hygiene is the …

Out of the box, Nginx is fast and stable but tells the world more than it should and accepts more abuse than it needs to. It advertises its exact version in every response header, negotiates TLS protocols that should have been retired years ago, and lets a single misbehaving client hammer an expensive endpoint as hard …

The moment an Ubuntu VPS gets a public IP, automated bots start knocking on port 22. Within hours you will see thousands of failed login attempts in your auth log — scripts cycling through root, admin, ubuntu, and a dictionary of weak passwords. SSH is the front door to your server, and the default configuration leaves …

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 …

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 …