Linux & VPS Basics — Roadmap
Twelve chapters that take you from a brand-new VPS to a hardened, monitored, ready-to-run-real-software box. No managed cloud.
What you will be able to do at the end
You will rent a VPS, harden it, install the things a real backend needs, and feel at home on the command line. Every other chapter on this site assumes you can do this. If you cannot already SSH into a box and feel comfortable, start here.
This track is vendor-neutral. Any VPS provider works — Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, a Raspberry Pi on your desk, or an old laptop. The skills are the box, not the brand.
Prereqs
- Comfortable typing in a terminal (you can
cdandls) - A laptop with
sshinstalled (macOS and Linux already have it; on Windows use WSL or PowerShell’s OpenSSH) - A credit card for a $5/month VPS (or use your own hardware)
The 12 chapters, in order
Foundations
- Picking a VPS — what a VPS actually is, how to choose, how to provision
- First login & SSH hardening — keys,
sshd_config, fail2ban, the front door - The Linux filesystem — paths, permissions, ownership, the FHS
- Processes & signals — what your app actually is on Linux
- systemd — services that survive reboot
Core
- Sockets, ports, and what’s listening —
ss,lsof, port theory - Firewall fundamentals —
nftables/iptables, the chains that protect you - Users, groups, and sudo — least privilege without ceremony
- Logs & journalctl — where output goes, how to read it, how to rotate it
Advanced
- Resource limits — cgroups,
ulimit, OOM killer, the limits that bite - Cron & systemd timers — scheduled work without surprises
- Production checklist — every box you ever provision, in one runbook
How to use this track
Read in order. Do every chapter on a real VPS, not in your head. Break things on purpose. Re-provision and do it again — muscle memory matters more than notes.
Total reading time: ~2.5 hours. Total hands-on time, the first time: 8–12 hours over a weekend.