Tips For Keeping Your VPS Flawless

virtual-private-servers

More often than not, it bugs you how to maintain a VPS once it is set up and running. It is somewhat difficult to come up with a right solution, as no one solution for this query works for everyone.

However, if you could ask an expert, they would suggest you a weekly or monthly scheduled maintenance for your VPS. Also, it is necessary to choose a reliable hosting provider for better security and tweaked performance.

Speaking of which, you may want to check out Hostinger or other robust hosting company for a flawless VPS functionality. For a secure and well maintained VPS, you must keep certain facts in mind. Below mentioned are the tips that throw more light on these fundamental facts;

Keep an eye on the resource utilization

Reviewing your resource utilization can help you in understanding the performance of your VPS. Some hosting companies provide you the dashboard that enables you to monitor resource usage over a regular interval of time.

It helps you in figuring out your VPS. Through SSD Nodes, you can take a look at this information. All you need to do is click on your preferred server and the “Graphs” link is displayed before you. For more details, you can choose top or htop for more nuanced details.

If you find any suspicious spike in the resources, you’ll look into the matter.

Monitor user accounts and logins

You need to make sure if there aren’t any malicious attempts done to get an access to your server through unknown user accounts. Also, you can always check who is logged in by using “w” at any given instant. The “last” command let you know each recent login.

And the “last log” command assists you in glancing at every single detailed information about every user account. Mostly, these commands are available in a human-readable format. You can utilize these commands to understand exactly when someone might have tried to access your VPS.

Establish a backup system and confirm if it’s functional

backup

Do not go too much into the details about which backup system to go with. It matters not much if it’s the custom “rsync” backup you opt or the mirroring VPS. The point is, it has to function exactly the way you want it to be.

Nothing is more devastating than knowing that your opted backup system failed to work and that too, eight weeks ago.

Update your OS’s security packages

If you talk about Linux in particular, the distribution of their security packages happens almost regularly. CentOS and Debian are more stable than Ubuntu in this case, but they are kept on changing consistently.

An outdated security package may contain certain vulnerabilities that lure attackers to breach into your VPS and degrade the performance. Fortunately, their updates are easily accessible and therefore, keeps the malicious elements at an arm’s length from your VPS.

Go for Automatic Updates

Only if you’d prefer not to go with the manual update procedure, you could choose to go with the automatic one. One of the biggest advantages of the automatic update is, it saves your time. If you’d ask what’s the demerit of it, an expert could say better keep an eye if something goes wrong with the update.

With that being said, it becomes no less than a hard nut to crack when it comes to tracking down the offending security update.

Just like WordPress, update all your services

If you update your security packages directly from the repositories of your distributor, it will take care of a lot of other software such as Apache or Nginx. On the other hand, anything that stays outside the reach of the repositories goes untouched.

It includes the CMS platform such as WordPress. Make sure you have gone through the documentation for every service and you are updating them regularly. This is applicable to all the plug-ins and extensions as well.

Nothing can beat WordPress when it comes to the security. However, if you have installed a dozen plug-ins, it may put you on a risk as each developer varies from another with regards to the skill. So, make it absolutely certain that you have installed only the required plug-ins.

Change your passwords consistently

change-password

There’s a lot of debate going on over the Internet whether to change your password regularly for the security reasons. However, it is the smart decision that you would make. The more you have to remember your password, the more you will jot them down.

You may even end up putting a weak strength of password just to avoid forgetting it. And that’s exactly where you put yourself on a risk. On the other hand, if you are managing a VPS on yourself, the risk involvement decreases.

Make sure your services handle downtime gracefully

This suggestion is for the end-users who deal with the mission-critical kind of services through their VPS. It could also apply to those who cannot afford to lose sight from the important database for a time period longer than usual.

Let’s assume for a moment, you face an unexpected downtime at the end of the data center, part of which, your node forcefully shuts down. Do you see your services getting started automatically when the server gets back on the run again?

Or you need to do it manually? It bothers not much to start from the square one every once in a while. However, if you are dealing with it on a consistent basis, you need to look into the matter. If all systems function falsely, look into each service log.

Final Verdict

At the end of the day, it’s up to you how you are formulating the maintenance of your VPS plan. It is not possible to recommend just one scheduled checklist to make your VPS functions well. Generally, system updates and some other technical actions work out well for one problem and for others, they do not. Hope the topic helped you in knowing how to maintain your VPS.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —