Congrats, you probably just subscribed for a Virtual Private Server ! This is great, you can use it for whatever you want to do: deploying your website or an app, doing remote development… That’s up to you !
You probably noticed already that there’s nothing on your VPS. Nothing at all, just the OS with default setup, and a root user.
Before you go and have fun with it, you should definitely do some basic setup. If you don’t, there’s a good chance that you end up loosing all your data after a random attack. Because yes, there are people randomly attacking servers all around the world, just like people randomly opening car doors at night. Except it’s during daytime too, and relentless.
Here are the few steps we’ll dive in today for a basic setup:
I'll be doing things on Debian 11, but it's about the same for the other distributions. Just be sure to user the commands corresponding to your system (apt install won't work on Arch or Fedora).
You’re about to become a hacker
You’re about to become a hacker
First things first, you need to login to your server in order to set it up. By default, you probably have a root user that you can use on an SSH connection.
ssh [email protected]
It'll ask your password. Don't worry if you don't know what it is: a password has probably been set up by your provider and maybe they sent it by email, or it can also be available on the dashboard of their website.
Here on IONOS, Afficher mot de passe stands for "Show password".