VPS
78 posts
Stop Scrapers & Bots Hammering Your VPS With Nginx Rate Limiting
If your VPS load average spikes every few hours for no obvious reason, and when you finally check the access log it's page after page of the same handful of IP…
Docker Bypassing Your UFW Firewall? Here's the Fix
You set up UFW on your VPS, locked it down to just SSH and a couple of web ports, and felt good about it. Then you installed Docker, ran a container with -p 54…
Nginx Server Blocks: Host Multiple Sites on One VPS
You've got one domain running fine on your VPS through Nginx, and now a second site needs a home — a client project, a side domain, a staging copy. The i…
Fix SSH "Host Key Verification Failed" After a Rebuild
You rebuild a VPS, restore a snapshot, or point an old hostname at a new IP, then run the same ssh command you've run a hundred times before — and instea…
Fix Fail2Ban Blocking Your Own IP: Unban & Whitelist Guide
You SSH into your VPS, the connection just hangs and then times out, and yet nothing else about the server has changed — no reboot, no firewall edit, no …
Fix WebSocket Connections Dropping Through Nginx Proxy
You deploy a chat app, a live dashboard, or a Socket.io-powered feature behind Nginx on your VPS, and it works fine on localhost. Push it live behind the rever…
Fix SSH "Permission Denied (publickey)" on Your VPS
You type ssh user@your-vps-ip, hit enter, and instead of a shell prompt you get Permission denied (publickey). No password prompt, no second chance — jus…
Fix Zombie & Defunct Processes Filling Up Your VPS
You run ps aux on your VPS and see a wall of processes marked <defunct>. Or worse, you try to SSH in, start a new script, or restart a service, and the s…
Fix 'Too Many Open Files' Errors on Your VPS
If your VPS logs are suddenly full of lines like Too many open files or EMFILE, don't panic and don't reboot yet. This is almost never a sign your server is dy…
Auto-Deploy to Your VPS With GitHub Actions Over SSH
If you're still deploying code to your VPS by SSHing in and running git pull by hand, you already know the failure modes: someone forgets a step, a file gets o…