VPS security essentials

As soon as you’ve ordered a VPS at WebHostingBuzz and received access credentials, we highly recommend to follow a few simple steps to ensure safe, secure and worry-free VPS instance.

Even though one of the major advantages of virtualization is that a virtual private server would not be able to harm its physical host server even if its security were compromised – still, you’re the owner of that VPS and you don’t want it to be compromised in the first place. So you still need to be security conscious, even if you are running a VPS as a temporary solution.

The following are basic VPS security tips.

Install all available software updates

New vulnerabilities are discovered and exploits created for them on a daily basis. It’s absolutely important that you initially and routinely check for and install any available security updates available for the Linux distro installed on your VPS.

Enforce secure passwords

Brute force and dictionary attacks are one of the most common types of security threats. It’s essential that you choose strong and complex passwords when creating and maintaining user accounts on your VPS. You should never use passwords that can be guessed easily – so don’t use street names, family members names, pet names and common dictionary words. Strong passwords consist of a complex combination of capital and lower case letters, numbers, special characters and have a minimum length of 8 characters. You should also change passwords regularly and require your users to do so as well.

Use a secure file transfer method

FTP isn’t the most secure in the world. If you have sensitive data or even if you just want to protect your password, you should use encrypted SSH. SFTP is one of the methods you can use.

Backup everything

If there is any chance that you will need something, you should have a backup for it. Routine, off-site, automated backups will ensure that if something ever goes wrong with your VPS, you can easily recover.

Remove unused accounts

User accounts that are expired, not in use and left from prior users are each a potential security risk. It’s always best to keep user accounts to only those that are required and used. Delete any that you no longer require.

Use a firewall

A good firewall strategy will protect services, ports and applications as strictly as possible. Monitor system and web server logs closely and routinely to look for signs of attempted break-ins. Block any IP addresses or IP ranges that are attempting to hack into your server. Block inbound traffic on sensitive ports to only allow traffic from trusted IP addresses.

Although a VPS is not exactly the same as a dedicated server, the administrative work it requires is very similar. You need to give it your full attention, keep it secure – then you can enjoy all of its benefits.