VPS Setup & Hardening (Hostinger, DO, Linode, Vultr)

I provision and harden Ubuntu VPS servers on Hostinger, DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr for businesses across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. A fresh VPS ships with password SSH on port 22 and no firewall — within hours bots are brute-forcing it. I lock that down properly: SSH key-only access with root login disabled, UFW firewall allowing only the ports your app needs, and Fail2Ban banning repeat offenders automatically.

On top of the hardened base I configure Nginx or Caddy as a reverse proxy with free Let's Encrypt SSL certificates that auto-renew, set up a swap file sized to your RAM, enable unattended security updates, and install basic monitoring so you see CPU, memory and disk before they become outages. If you already have an app — Node.js, PHP, Python or a static site — I deploy it behind the proxy as part of the same engagement.

This is general-purpose server work for any application, not tied to one platform. For a free-zone or mainland SME in the UAE, a hardened 2-vCPU VPS at roughly AED 30–60 per month replaces managed hosting bills several times that, and you keep root access. Everything I do is written up in a handover document, so your team or any future engineer can pick it up without me.

How it works

1. 1
   Tell me the workload

   You share what the server will run, expected traffic, and which provider you prefer — or I recommend one with UAE-friendly latency.

2. 2
   Provision and harden

   I spin up the VPS, apply SSH, firewall and Fail2Ban hardening, and configure the proxy with SSL on your domain.

3. 3
   Deploy and verify

   Your app goes live behind HTTPS; I run security and load sanity checks and confirm monitoring is reporting.

4. 4
   Handover

   You receive the credentials, the runbook, and a walkthrough call so you know exactly how to operate the server.