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What a coincidence, I spun up my first VM on DigitalOcean just yesterday for $4 a month. It felt... freeing after a few years of working with the Big Three for various things, big and small.

Still a step above schlepping your own hardware, but it was still the cheapest Debian VM I could find by about a factor of 2. (Admittedly, I didn't look too hard, let me know if you know a better one.)

https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/common-sense-...



The cheapest VPS on 1blu costs 9€ and is about the level of a 48€ DigitalOcean droplet, with infinite traffic. (On my VPS I get a couple hundred Mb/s download speed.)

Tradeoff: It's hosted in Germany only and the website is pretty bad.


Infinite traffic? That's a heck of a pitch, actually.


I'd suggest adding ssh-audit to your list. It's literally a tool to harden SSH configs.

https://www.ssh-audit.com/


This looks good, but unfortunately it doesn't give you the config to fix your setup, it just complains about your curves.


The website has guides for common OSes with one-liners to harden your config: https://ssh-audit.com/hardening_guides.html


Thanks! Gonna take this into use, seems fun.


Excellent, thanks!


might I suggest changing the port ssh runs on from 22 to something else in your guide? and imo fail2ban -1 is just a recpie for getting locked out.

personally I found the $4 DO droplet underpowered.


I've been considering changing the SSH port, just for that extra bit of security. As for fail2ban -1, I just like seeing the Banned IP list slowly engulf the screen over time ;)


changing the ssh port is also for noise reasons. The number of drive bys on port 22 is insane.




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