Self-Hosting Like a Pro, Part 1: Hardening a Fresh Ubuntu VPS

This is the first article in a four-part series where I document how I turned a 10€/month VPS into a production-grade platform hosting my portfolio, a university group webapplication and a SaaS product, all isolated from each other with Kubernetes. In this part, we take a fresh Ubuntu server and lock it down properly before installing anything else. Why bother with hardening? The moment your VPS gets a public IP address, it starts receiving attacks. Not "might receive", it starts . Within minutes, automated bots will probe port 22, try root:root , admin:admin123 and thousands of other credential combinations. If you skip this step and jump straight to deploying your apps, you are building on sand. The good news: an hour of work is enough to eliminate the vast majority of these threats. Here is what we will set up: A non-root user with sudo privileges SSH key authentication, with passwords and root login disabled UFW as a simple, effective firewall Fail2ban to ban brute-force attackers automatically Automatic security updates What you need A fresh VPS running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or newer. I use a Hostinger KVM 2 (2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB NVMe), but any provider works: Hetzner, DigitalOcean, OVH, Contabo. The root password or SSH key your provider gave you. A terminal on your local machine (macOS, Linux, or WSL on Windows). Throughout this tutorial, replace YOUR_SERVER_IP with your server's IP address and deploy with the username you want to use. Step 1: First login and system update Connect as root for the first and last time: ssh root@YOUR_SERVER_IP Update everything before touching anything else: apt update && apt upgrade -y apt autoremove -y If a kernel update was installed, reboot now: reboot Wait a minute, then reconnect. Step 2: Create a non-root user Working as root is like driving without a seatbelt: fine until it isn't. One mistyped rm -rf and the party is over. Create a dedicated user: adduser deploy Choose a strong password (you will still need it for sudo ,