// Topic
VPS, Linux, web stack, migrations, hosting, databases, and core operations.
Typical tasks
// Materials on this topic
44 articles
2026-09-22
After the move to Hugo the site turned from a heavy, constantly crashing thing into a light and fast static archive — and it became clear this wouldn’t be the end of it. If the site is now fast and doesn’t need a …
2026-09-22
I have a project that I treat with particular care. Fifteen years ago I built a news portal for a small town — a typical regional site that ran reliably for several years, published news and gradually accumulated …
2026-09-22
Yocto Project — an open project that helps build custom Linux systems for embedded devices, regardless of CPU architecture. It is not a distribution, but a set of tools and metadata: from source code an image is built …
2026-09-22
OpenWrt is a free Linux-based firmware for routers and other network devices. It replaces the factory firmware and turns a router into a full system with a package manager: you can run a VPN, split the network into …
2026-09-22
Connection pooler for PostgreSQL — a program between the application and the database that keeps a small number of real connections to the server and hands them out to clients in turn. The best known are PgBouncer and …
2026-09-22
A proxy for MySQL is a program between an application and database servers. The application connects to the proxy like a regular MySQL server, and the proxy decides which server to send a query to: writes — to the …
2026-09-22
phpMyAdmin works only with MySQL and MariaDB. If you have PostgreSQL, phpMyAdmin won’t connect to it — for PostgreSQL people use pgAdmin or Adminer. Adminer also works for MySQL, so it often replaces phpMyAdmin …
2026-09-22
LAMP and LEMP are two classic stacks for PHP sites: Linux, a web server, a database, and PHP. They differ by the web server: LAMP uses Apache, LEMP uses Nginx. In practice the more important difference is how the web …
2026-09-22
Where to store a company’s files, databases, and backups — on your own equipment or in a provider’s cloud — is not a technical question, but an economic and legal one. The answer determines expenses for several years …
2026-09-22
Rsync — a utility for copying and synchronizing files, the standard tool for Linux and Unix administrators. Its main feature is delta transfer: if a file already exists on the receiving side, rsync transmits only the …
2026-09-22
When you need to work with files directly on the server — open documents, save projects, keep shared departmental folders — you use network file system protocols. There are two: SMB, familiar to Windows users, and NFS, …
2026-09-22
Chats, notifications, market quotes, collaborative editing, and neural network responses that appear as words — all of this requires the server to push data to the client immediately, without repeated requests. HTTP is …
2026-09-22
Caddy, Traefik, HAProxy, Nginx and Apache solve overlapping problems — they accept HTTP requests, terminate TLS and forward traffic to applications — but they are built differently and are good in different places. Below …
2026-09-22
FreeIPA — a centralized account management system for Linux servers and workstations. It solves the same problem as Active Directory in the Windows world: users, groups, passwords, access rights to servers and sudo rules …
2026-09-22
This section explains what an OpenVPN Community installation consists of and how to assemble a minimal working configuration: a certificate authority, server and client certificates, a tls-crypt key, and the server.conf …
2026-09-22
A firewall, Fail2ban and CrowdSec respond to attacks that are already underway. An audit solves a different task: to find weak spots in the server configuration in advance — extra services, permissive SSH settings, …
2026-09-22
Firewall — the first thing you set up on a new server, even before Fail2ban, CrowdSec, and auditing. Its job is simple: allow only the traffic needed by running services and drop everything else. The fewer open ports, …
2026-09-22
Fail2ban protects each server individually: it only sees its own logs and doesn’t know that the same addresses attacked thousands of other machines a minute ago. CrowdSec solves the same problem — detect attacks …
2026-09-22
Any server with SSH open gets scanned by bots within minutes after startup: they try common usernames and passwords, making thousands of attempts per hour. A firewall won’t help here — the SSH port must be open. …
2026-09-22
Xen — a Type 1 open-source hypervisor: it runs directly on the hardware, before any operating system. The project is developed under the Linux Foundation, the primary license is GPLv2. Current version — Xen 4.22 (30 July …
2026-09-22
QEMU — a free emulator and virtualizer, distributed under the GPLv2 license. It does two different things. First, it can emulate an entire computer, including a CPU of another architecture: for example, run an ARM system …
2026-09-22
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) — a virtualization subsystem built into the Linux kernel since version 2.6.20. It uses CPU hardware virtualization support (Intel VT-x, AMD-V) and turns the Linux kernel into a …
2026-09-22
Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) — a virtualization platform installed on a server as a ready system and managed via a web interface. It is based on Debian, runs virtual machines on KVM and QEMU, and containers …
2026-09-22
Virtualization allows you to run multiple independent virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical server. Each VM has its own operating system, its own disks and network interfaces, while the processor, memory and …
2026-09-22
What is Dokploy Dokploy is a panel for deploying applications to your own server. It is installed on a VPS, runs on top of Docker and Docker Swarm, and takes on what Vercel and Netlify do in their cloud: building from …
2026-09-22
What is Netlify Netlify is a cloud platform for hosting websites and automatic frontend deployment. You connect a Git repository, and Netlify builds the site on each change, publishes it to its CDN, and creates a preview …
2026-09-22
What is Vercel Vercel is a cloud platform for hosting and automatically deploying websites and frontend applications. You connect a Git repository, and Vercel builds the project and publishes it to its content delivery …
2026-09-22
When a website or web application is ready, it needs to be hosted so that every code change reaches users without manual work. This is solved in two ways: a cloud platform that handles build, hosting and content …
2026-09-22
Supabase — a backend platform based on PostgreSQL. It combines a database, an automatically generated REST API, user sign-up and sign-in, file storage, server functions, and change subscriptions. The code is released …
2026-09-22
Plesk — the world’s second most widespread commercial hosting control panel after cPanel. Unlike cPanel, it runs not only on Linux but also on Windows Server, and its capabilities are extended by an extensions …
2026-09-22
cPanel — the most widespread commercial hosting control panel in the world. Most of the shared virtual hosting abroad runs on it, and many guides on the internet are written assuming its interface. cPanel is developed …
2026-09-22
FASTPANEL — a free server control panel developed by the hosting provider FASTVPS team. It is installed on a personal VPS or a dedicated server to manage websites, databases, mail, and backups via a web interface without …
2026-09-22
Hestia Control Panel (HestiaCP) — a free open-source hosting control panel licensed under GPLv3. The project grew out of VestaCP, which stopped being developed, and is now maintained by the community. HestiaCP is …
2026-09-22
ispmanager — a commercial hosting control panel from a Russian developer. It is widely used by Russian hosting providers; many offer it preinstalled on VPS. After WebPros stopped servicing customers from Russia and …
2026-09-22
A hosting control panel is a web interface for administering a server with websites. Through it you add domains, issue certificates, create databases and mailboxes, and configure backups. The panel is installed on a VPS …
2026-09-22
n8n can be used in two ways: subscribe to the developers’ cloud service n8n Cloud or install the platform on your own server. Workflows and nodes are the same in both cases; what differs are the price, …
2026-09-21
PostgreSQL — a free object-relational DBMS developed by an independent international community. The project started in 1986 at the University of California, Berkeley under the name POSTGRES; in 1996 it received its …
2026-09-21
MySQL — a relational DBMS that has remained one of the most widespread in web development since the late 1990s. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, many online stores and forums run on it, and it is supported by virtually every …
2026-09-21
A database is an organized storage of information that an application uses to write, search, modify, and delete data. A database server (DBMS) is the program that manages this storage: it accepts requests, maintains data …
2026-09-21
Nginx — an open-source (BSD-licensed) web server and reverse proxy. Since 2019 the project has been owned by F5. Besides the free version there is a commercial Nginx Plus. Nginx serves static files, accepts HTTPS, …
2026-09-21
A proxy server is a program that accepts network requests from a client and forwards them to the target server. The response also passes through the proxy. As a result, the client and server do not connect directly, and …
2026-09-21
Cloud 1C relieves you of server maintenance, but not of choosing a provider or of responsibility for access to your data. In this part — how cloud services differ, how much they cost, how to retrieve your data, and how …
2026-09-21
When the method of acquiring 1C is chosen, you need to decide where the database will reside: on the user’s computer, on a server in the office, or with a hosting provider. This affects performance, reliability, …
2026-09-21
The easiest way to get a website is to build it with a website builder. A website builder is an online service where pages are assembled from pre-built blocks: text, images, galleries, forms, and buttons. No programming …