This is the first article in a four-part series where I document how I turned a 10€/month VPS into a production-grade platform hosting my portfolio, a university group webapplication and a SaaS product, all isolated from each other with Kubernetes. In this part, we take a fresh Ubuntu server and lock it down properly before installing anything else.
Why bother with hardening?
The moment your VPS gets a public IP address, it starts receiving attacks. Not "might receive", it starts. Within minutes, automated bots will probe port 22, try root:root, admin:admin123 and thousands of other credential combinations. If you skip this step and jump straight to deploying your apps, you are building on sand.
The good news: an hour of work is enough to eliminate the vast majority of these threats. Here is what we will set up:
A non-root user with sudo privileges
