A VPS, Finally

This rainy Sunday, I finally got my first VPS. I’ve always wanted to self-host my blogs and maybe some other services, and I wanted to use one of my Raspberry Pi. Unluckily, the renovation is taking me much more time than expected, so in the meanwhile I decided to get a VPS.

First, I opted for Hetzner in order to have the data hosted in the EU (not a big deal, it’s mostly a conviction of mine). It’s quite cheap, too. Then, I got Rocky Linux as Operating System because I loved CentOS, and I am very familiar with it. Last, as Web server, I installed nginx. I had never used it(!), but I heard very good feedback about it, so it took me a few moments to decide.

I spent a few moments to harden the OS (it’s my job!) and I won’t give many details here because I’m a bit paranoid. 🤓 But generally I:

• Changed the SSH port
• Granted SSH access just to a non-admin user
• Disabled root login via SSH
• Left only the necessary TCP ports open (literally three, for now) on both the OS firewall and the Hetzner one

In an hour or so, my static websites were already there, and then I spent the next morning to fight against some nginx configurations. I noticed that, when accessing http://ip-address, the response was OK, but when using https, the first website in alphabetical order appeared!

Then, after a few hours, while feeding the cats and preparing tomato sauce (that’s another story, I’ll write about it), I found an amazing answer on Stack Overflow which addressed precisely my issue. Never happened before. 🥲

Now I want to install some more software, e.g. Pi-Hole, but I think I prefer running most of them on a private network… on the Raspberry Pi, after moving in the new house. We’ll see when that’ll happen. 👴

🎧 A wonderful track I discovered in The Bear OST

📖 Always The Dark Forest

A VPS, Finally Massimo Scagliola

This rainy Sunday, I finally got my first VPS. I’ve always wanted to self-host my blogs and maybe some other services, and I wanted to use one of my Raspberry Pi. Unluckily, the renovation is taking me much more time than expected, so in the meanwhile I decided to get a VPS.

First, I opted for Hetzner in order to have the data hosted in the EU (not a big deal, it’s mostly a conviction of mine). It’s quite cheap, too. Then, I got Rocky Linux as Operating System because I loved CentOS, and I am very familiar with it. Last, as Web server, I installed nginx. I had never used it(!), but I heard very good feedback about it, so it took me a few moments to decide.

I spent a few moments to harden the OS (it’s my job!) and I won’t give many details here because I’m a bit paranoid. 🤓 But generally I:

• Changed the SSH port
• Granted SSH access just to a non-admin user
• Disabled root login via SSH
• Left only the necessary TCP ports open (literally three, for now) on both the OS firewall and the Hetzner one

In an hour or so, my static websites were already there, and then I spent the next morning to fight against some nginx configurations. I noticed that, when accessing http://ip-address, the response was OK, but when using https, the first website in alphabetical order appeared!

Then, after a few hours, while feeding the cats and preparing tomato sauce (that’s another story, I’ll write about it), I found an amazing answer on Stack Overflow which addressed precisely my issue. Never happened before. 🥲

Now I want to install some more software, e.g. Pi-Hole, but I think I prefer running most of them on a private network… on the Raspberry Pi, after moving in the new house. We’ll see when that’ll happen. 👴

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🎧 A wonderful track I discovered in The Bear OST

📖 Always The Dark Forest

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