VPS: tutorials & guidesAll tutorials around your own VPS

A VPS is an independent Linux system with root access and its own public IPv4 address. It is ready after around 120 seconds - everything else you set up yourself, and everything else is therefore also your responsibility: system updates, security, services, backups. That is exactly how it differs from web hosting and game servers, where this layer comes ready-made.

This order has proven itself:

1. Connect and update. Log in via SSH, update the package sources, create your own user with sudo, set host name and time zone.
2. Secure it. Keys instead of passwords, switch off root login, set up Fail2ban.
3. Set up the application. Only then comes the actual service - web server, Docker stack, cloud or voice server.
4. Set up backups. As a separate work step, not as a resolution for later.

There is one property of the platform you should know in advance: our VPS run as LXC containers with nesting enabled. Docker and Docker Compose therefore work, but a custom kernel or your own kernel modules do not. For web servers, databases, game servers, voice servers, bots and container workloads, that makes no difference - if you absolutely need your own kernel, first read the comparison of LXC and KVM at the bottom of this page.

Getting started & security

You should work through these two tutorials before anything else, and in this order. A freshly provisioned server is connected to the network with a public IPv4 address and can therefore be reached from the entire internet. Automated scanners find it and try common user names with default passwords - that is not a targeted attack, but background noise. A key pair instead of a password removes the basis for this class of attack.

Do not lock yourself out when switching over: test the new access in a second, still open session before you switch off password login or change the port. Should it happen anyway, the VNC console in the web interface gets you onto the server bypassing the SSH service - and in the worst case, you can reinstall the operating system yourself at any time.

Setting up applications

What most people run on their own server - each from installation to the first working configuration. Two notes apply to all tutorials in this group. As soon as a service is to be reachable under a name instead of the bare IP, you need a matching DNS record; how to set it is described in Point a domain to your VPS. And as soon as several web services are to run on the same server, a reverse proxy in front of them is the clean solution, because ports 80 and 443 cannot be shared between several applications.

On choosing a plan: a voice server or a single bot gets by with little memory, a stack of reverse proxy, application and database needs considerably more. If you misjudge it, you can upgrade later - the current specifications and prices are on the product page.

Operation

On a VPS, backups are entirely in your hands - automatic backups are not part of the plan, but root access gives you every tool for them. A common approach is a nightly cron job that pushes the relevant directories and a database dump to an external target via rsync, Borg or restic.

Two points decide whether this holds up in an emergency. First, the backup does not belong on the same server: what is lost together with the original is not a backup. Second, you must have rehearsed the restore at least once - a backup that has never been restored is an assumption. The tutorial describes both step by step.

Before ordering

If it is not yet clear whether a VPS is the right thing at all. It is not automatically the better solution, but the more demanding one. It is worth it if you need software that a shared environment does not offer, if several services are to be bundled on one machine or if you deliberately want full control over every setting.

It is not worth it if the end result is to be a WordPress site with a few mailboxes - that runs on web hosting with less effort and without a permanent maintenance duty. And for a single game, a ready-made game server is usually the faster route. After the plan overview, three guides compare the alternatives objectively: first the type of virtualization, then web hosting, then game servers.

Frequently asked questions