Thoughts, tutorials, and insights from the trenches.
There is no single 'best' VPS provider. But there is a short list of questions that narrows down the options extremely fast, and almost none of them are on the specs page.
Nextcloud's default install technically works. But a handful of specific settings around cron, caching, and upload limits separate 'it runs' from 'it runs well enough that people actually use it.'
ModSecurity paired with the OWASP Core Rule Set knows absolutely nothing about the specific application running behind it. That is exactly why it is so useful. It brutally catches the generic exploit attempts that hit every single server, regardless of what is actually running.
Adding a TOTP code on top of key-only SSH sounds like great defense in depth. But before you break your automation, let's be honest about what it actually protects against.
An ELK stack is massive overkill for one server, but 'grep through /var/log and hope' isn't a strategy either. There is a useful middle ground.
Prometheus and Grafana sound like enterprise tools for a dedicated ops team. But the setup for a single VPS is small enough to be worth it, and it scales perfectly when a second server shows up.
Almost every compromised WordPress site I have ever cleaned up was hit by something incredibly boring: an outdated plugin, a weak admin password, or a random theme nobody remembered installing. The fixes are exactly as boring, and that is exactly why they work.
'Zero downtime migration' sounds like it needs special tooling. Almost always, it just needs the new server fully tested before DNS changes, and a TTL that was lowered days in advance.
OpenLiteSpeed is pitched hard in WordPress hosting circles as the undeniably faster option. Whether that outweighs Nginx's sheer ubiquity depends on who else has to work on the server.
'Our site is slow, can you look at it?' is one of the most common requests I get. Almost every single time, the fix is the exact same handful of things in the exact same order. Server-side first, frontend plugins absolutely last.