This post isn’t going to be very interesting for most people but it’s the results of a conversation I had online recently about what sort of maintenance to do for a VPS (Virtual Private Server). These things don’t require much manual help, but whatever you don’t watch will eventually fail, so I wanted to come up with some good strategies for preventing issues.
1. Reboot every 180 days. Yep, twice a year simply reboot the VM. Upon reboot, the machine will do a FSCK which should cover a few potential problems.
2. Know exactly what is, and what isn’t updated automatically. Have a look at things like WHM, CPanel, Spamassassin, kernel, etc. Create a schedule for updates of things that do not happen automatically
3. Security. We use cPHulk to prevent unauthorised logins- but maybe there is something else to prevent logins from outside our geo, or other methods of prevention? We get apx 20-40 dodgy login attempts per day.
4. Resource limits. It’s common for accounts that get hacked to use a lot of resources and make the server slow for other users. Time to investigate methods of limiting resource use for individual accounts. Cloudlinux was suggested but we don’t currently have that.