Comment by throwaway38375 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway38375 | Hacker News Reader

Some tips:

1. Digital Ocean offer small VPS for $5 per month. That's a 50% saving right away!

2. Stick with Ubuntu in the beginning. It's not the best, but it's 100% good enough and has so much support and tutorials out there.

3. If you have a small VPS with not much RAM, definitely set up a swapfile. It gives you virtual RAM for doing RAM heavy things on a small VPS.

4. Use the virtual firewalls offered by your host rather than the server firewalls in the beginning. If you mess up a server firewall you may have to get your host to reset it for you. If you mess up a virtual firewall you can amend it through a web UI and get back to doing things quickly.

5. Learn to read man pages and log files. Between the two you can figure out how to do stuff, and then figure out why it isn't working correctly.

6. In terms of security, use a recent distro, use a firewall close everything you don't need, use SSH keys, and set up secure passwords for everything else, and you will avoid a lot of problems.

7. Keep an eye on resources, programs like top, uptime, free, df, and du will allow you to see what's using up CPU, RAM, or disk space.

8. Learn a relational database. MySQL or Postgres are good choices. This skill will keep you employed for years, almost every business uses a relational database in one way or another!

9. Have fun :)

Thanks! Especially for the swapfile, hadn't heard of that one before. And your comment history makes me want to read up about ansible as well :D

Ubuntu Server is superb! You can install it with one click in AWS Lightsail, configured securely with or without apps, with a public IP.

I will add 6.1 use containers and keep you VPS clean.

P.s. as an alternative to ubuntu you could check Alpine Linux (for both root vps and containers)

Good luck!

Curious why you say Ubuntu is not the best. What would you consider better?

Not OP, but ubuntu is among the best documented an supported, which is critical for beginners.

What may not be good about Ubuntu for some is that it's too bloated and not difficult to learn for someone who wants to hang their hat on that.

Moving from Ubuntu to another Debian installation, including debian is no big deal.

Personally I think debian is the best server OS to learn. It's sufficiently similar to ubuntu that you can get away with either one really, they aren't very different as ubuntu is based on debian.

I'd recommend Debian as the uncontroversial Linux server distro.

But for someone who might have some Ubuntu experience and little other Linux experience, running an Ubuntu server might lead to fewer surprises. Ubuntus do ship with things that Debians don't have. I can't name any, since I don't use Ubuntu, but they're the things about which you either say "how nice!" or "how dull!"

Nix?

I think it's a question of how sharp the tool is, and how 'idiot-proof' it's been made. Ubuntu is as idiot-proof as Linuxes go, but the more knowledgeable you get the more you find use for a sharper tool that fits your domain requirements better.

Debian is molded to the server domain pretty closely; Red Hat / Rocky is ideal in regulatory environments; Alpine when the priority is to be lightweight and reliable; I run Void on my personal machines because it's the most BSD of the Linuxes and stays out of my way when I need to do weird stuff.

If you're a beginner, you can append 'ubuntu' to your google searches instead of 'linux' and get an answer that makes sense. You'll know when to move on from ubuntu when you have to search 'foo bar linux' to get a usable answer.

I tend to append archlinux to google searches to get quality answers from ArchLinux Wiki.

Heh, fair. I should see if that does any better.

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