Guides
Hands-on walkthroughs for the things people do with a new server — put a website on it, run containers, build a VPN, check new hardware — plus how to back it up somewhere else and what the proxy types actually differ on.
Point a domain at your server, serve it with Nginx, add a free HTTPS certificate that renews itself, and put an app behind it — on Ubuntu or Debian.
Install Docker from the official repository, run services with Compose, and avoid two traps: published ports skipping the firewall and logs filling the disk.
Sign in to a Windows Server VPS from Windows, macOS or Linux, then lock Remote Desktop down so it is not open to every password-guessing bot on the internet.
Your own VPN in about fifteen minutes: WireGuard on Ubuntu or Debian, a client for your laptop or phone, and the forwarding and firewall rules it needs.
Connect your VPSes in the same region with the private network add-on. Traffic between them isn't counted toward bandwidth. How to add it and use it safely.
A VPS is a slice of a shared machine, ready in minutes and easy to resize; a dedicated server is the whole machine. How to tell which one you need.
Before moving onto new hardware: confirm what you got, check drive health and RAID, burn in the CPU and memory, and set up alerts for a failing disk.
Fifteen minutes on a new Ubuntu or Debian server: your own user, SSH keys instead of passwords, a firewall for just what you use, and automatic updates.
What “Permission denied (publickey)”, “Connection refused”, “Connection timed out” and “host identification has changed” mean, and how to fix each.
Leaving DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Hetzner, Lightsail or shared hosting? Copy files and database, test before DNS changes, then switch in minutes.
Keep MT4 or MT5 and your Expert Advisors running while your computer is off: a location near your broker, no sign-outs, and updates kept to weekends.
Find what filled the disk with df, du and ncdu, then safely clear the usual suspects: logs, the journal, Docker, package caches and deleted files held open.
Check whether a server already has swap, add a swap file in four commands, keep it after a reboot, and set swappiness so it is a safety net, not a slowdown.
Rough sizes for websites, WordPress, databases, Docker stacks, game servers and Windows, and how to measure what your own server actually uses before resizing.
A KVM VPS runs its own kernel; an OpenVZ or LXC container shares the host's. What that changes for Docker, VPNs, kernel modules, memory and isolation.
Leaving shared hosting: what to download from cPanel, how to move WordPress and its database, and what to do about email, which a VPS does not include.
What “An internal error has occurred”, “Your credentials did not work”, a black screen and the CredSSP error mean on a Windows server, and how to fix each one.
A Minecraft Java server in Docker that picks the right Java, survives reboots and backs up the world, with port, memory and whitelist settings explained.
Run the n8n workflow automation tool on your own server with Docker Compose and HTTPS, so webhooks work, data stays with you, and updates are one command.
Monthly transfer vs port speed, what counts toward it, how much a website or backup really uses, and what happens on Virteche Cloud at the allowance.
Measure your latency to each location before ordering, what the numbers mean for websites, games and trading, and when distance matters.
Replace Dropbox or Google Drive with Nextcloud All-in-One on your own server: HTTPS, desktop and phone sync, and encrypted nightly backups to a storage box.
Watch your websites, APIs and servers from a VPS with Uptime Kuma in Docker: HTTPS, alerts to email, Discord or Telegram, and a public status page.
Coolify is a self-hosted alternative to Heroku, Netlify and Vercel. Install it, secure the dashboard, point a domain at it, and deploy an app from Git.
WireGuard is a fast, minimal VPN protocol, OpenVPN a mature TLS-based one, and Tailscale a managed mesh built on WireGuard. Which to run, and where.
iptables and nftables are the kernel's rule languages; UFW and firewalld write those rules for you. Which one your server uses, and how not to mix them.
Both serve websites well. Apache is configured per directory with .htaccess; Nginx is event-driven and the usual reverse proxy. Which to install on a VPS.
Let's Encrypt could not fetch the challenge from your server. The usual causes are DNS, a closed port 80, the wrong web root or a proxy. How to check each.
Docker publishes container ports through its own rules, which traffic reaches before UFW's. Three ways to close them, and how to check that it worked.
Run your own program as a service that starts at boot and restarts if it fails, and fix status=203/EXEC, 200/CHDIR and 217/USER when it will not start.
Encrypted, deduplicated nightly backups of a Linux server to a storage box over SSH: set up once with a key, pruned automatically, and tested by restoring.
A storage box is reached over SSH on port 23. How to use it from sftp, scp and rsync, and how to point restic, rclone, Kopia and SFTP apps at it.
Point S3 tools at Virteche object storage: the endpoint, region and path-style setting, then the AWS CLI, rclone, restic and pre-signed links.
One is a disk you reach over SSH; the other is an HTTP API for apps and S3 tools. Which suits your backups depends on the tools you use and how you restore.
Four open-source backup tools compared on encryption, deduplication, storage, Windows support and clean-up, and which fits a server, a laptop or a mix.
Move a bucket from AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2 or DigitalOcean Spaces to any S3-compatible storage with rclone: copy, check, switch.
Nightly compressed dumps of MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL sent to S3-compatible storage by a systemd timer, kept 30 days, and restored to prove they work.
Use remote storage like a local folder: rclone mount on Windows, macOS and Linux, SSHFS on Linux, and the cache settings that stop apps from misbehaving.
Three copies, two kinds of storage, one off-site, and the two things the rule leaves out: copies a hacked server cannot delete, and testing that restores work.
Off-site TrueNAS backups with a Cloud Sync task: the S3 credential, encryption, snapshots, a test restore, and versioned backups from the shell.
Three tested ways to keep Proxmox VE backups off-site: Proxmox Backup Server with an S3 datastore, a remote PBS, or vzdump with rsync.
scp copies files, rsync copies only what changed and can resume, and rclone talks to cloud storage. Which to use for each job, with the commands.
Block storage is a raw disk, file storage a shared folder, object storage an HTTP API for whole files. What each is for and how to tell which you need.
ZFS and Btrfs checksum every block and take snapshots; plain RAID only keeps disks in step. How they differ on a server or NAS, and which to choose.
What rsync's exit codes mean, from 23 (some files not transferred) to 255 (SSH failed), with the real error text for each and how to fix it.
Borg 1.x cannot write to S3. Your options: an SSH storage box Borg speaks natively, syncing a local repository with rclone, restic instead, or Borg 2.
The three proxy types differ by who the IP address is registered to, not how they are hosted. What that means for speed, cost and how often you get blocked.
HTTP proxies understand web requests; SOCKS5 forwards any TCP connection without reading it. Which one you want depends entirely on what you are connecting.
Your credentials arrive as ip:port:username:password. This walks through using them from curl, a browser, and the tools that most often need a proxy configured.
Working code for an authenticated proxy in requests, httpx, Playwright, Puppeteer and Selenium, and the limitation that trips up browser automation.
What 407, ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED, ERR_PROXY_CONNECTION_FAILED, 403 and timeouts mean when using a proxy, and how to tell whose side the problem is on.
Check a proxy before you rely on it: the exit IP and who owns it, the location sites will see, whether DNS leaks around it, and how fast it really is.
A rotating proxy gives you a new IP per request or every few minutes; a static one keeps the same address. How each works and when to use which.