New Editorial: The Myth of VPS Hosting, Reasons to Avoid It!
 

Latest editorial:

• The Myth of VPS Hosting: Reasons to Avoid It! – Part 1: Hidden Costs
• The Myth of VPS Hosting: Reasons to Avoid It! – Part 2: Management Woes

Author Notes:

This is one of those topics that's been annoying for years. It feels good to get things like this out in the open. Far too often, JimBobGuruRockstarNinja at some forum -- in other words, a kiddie or amateur hosting user, often from Webhostingtalk.com or WarriorForum.com -- insists VPS is the best thing ever. These people couldn't be more wrong. A VPS is great -- just like a dedicated server or private cloud -- but it's not for everyone. And this editorial goes over the reasons why.


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Thanks for reading. :thumb:

Move SSH to another port. :)

Security through obscurity is good however, unless the firewall is blocking port scanning, the port can still be found.

A better alternative would be to change the port still, but also use a wheel group for privilege elevation. That alone adds a second layer of security, of course as long as the root password is different from any standard user passwords.

It's certainly not the only thing I do, the benefits are a cleaner log file and more room for firewalling the more aggressive IP's. :D

Moving SSH to another port is my first layer of defense and my last is I get sent an email for any successful root logins. If it gets to that point obviously they are in but at least I know they are in. There is many layers in between.

And disable root logins. Most of this was in my "cheat sheet" in the editorial, where I gave the example of what happens to VPS when deployed. Like I had said there, this is just SSH too. There is so much more to it. Trying to monitor everything every day is really a PITA sometimes. Even when you take a "day off", you have to at least spend 15 minutes looking over the logs and alerts.

Shared hosting is so much easier.

Several guides for these things are here: http://www.digitalFAQ.com/forum/guides-ssh/
Part of the new hosting guides section being developed right now.