How do you secure your Linux VPS?

[Arantor]

If you are on "managed hosting" (not sure if you are referring to shared hosting, SaaS or an actual VPS/dedi with a 3rd party maintaining it) then you shouldn't be "messing" at the OS level of administration anyways. That's the whole point of "managed".

You'd think... you'd really think, but Kinsta for example, if you want to add a cron task, you're going to SSH in and use nano to edit the crontab because they don't offer a nice UI for it.

Similarly if you're using Cloudways, they offer various of the command line functions (WP-CLI, access to Artisan if you're using Laravel, access to set up things with supervisord), even some access to Node and npm (e.g. compiling + minifying JS/CSS) but no access to any of the package managers to install anything. I *suspect* you could install joe and mc directly, as static binaries, but I don't know if that would be problematic on their hosting environments.

 

[Tracy]

You'd think... you'd really think, but Kinsta for example, if you want to add a cron task, you're going to SSH in and use nano to edit the crontab because they don't offer a nice UI for it.

that's why I said you STILL have to learn the basics of edit/save/close for the two basic default editors... vi and nano.... but for everyday editing of files at a server administration level (which setting up a crontab really doesn't count as, that would be more going into your /etc/crontab location and manually creating those jobs at a system wide root cron jobs), that can easily be done by JOE. In fact, you can go into your /var/spool/cron/crontab and actually create your crontab jobs manually with any editor, simply naming them the username in that location and given them the correct CHMOD/CHOWN settings and not having to use crontab -e.

Similarly if you're using Cloudways, they offer various of the command line functions (WP-CLI, access to Artisan if you're using Laravel, access to set up things with supervisord), even some access to Node and npm (e.g. compiling + minifying JS/CSS) but no access to any of the package managers to install anything. I *suspect* you could install joe and mc directly, as static binaries, but I don't know if that would be problematic on their hosting environments.

And this is a totally different instance than setting up a VPS running Linux (which is what the original conversation was about) on a VPS/dedicated server and securing it.
At that level, you aren't "administering" anything. It's like saying that someone that has login access and correct permissions on a Windows Server and can add printers and share points is "administering" the Windows server. They may be "managing" an aspect of it, but it's a far cry from administering it.