Many developers have been turning to Virtual Private Servers to host their projects, and with good reason: unlike in a shared hosting environment, you are not running the risk of someone else's badly written code resulting in poor performance or (worse yet) your site being compromised because of someone else's insecure programming.

With a Virtual Private Server, you have complete control over the software that is available to you, and you can fine tune the server to meet your exact needs. But setting up a secure VPS takes a bit of work, and requires a bit of learning.

This course will take you through the basics of setting up a fast, secure VPS on Linode, DigitalOcean, AWS Lightsail, Vultr or any other provider that offers VPSLinux hosting. We'll set up an Ubuntu 20.04 server with the most commonly needed software, and ensure that it is locked down as securely as possible. We will also go through best practices for adding users, software, and services, and ensure that we choose the right kind of server for a particular project. We will learn how to implement public and private keys for secure access using SSH, how to edit files on the remote server through the command line using vi or nano/pico, how to use the most common and useful Linux command line programs, and how to configure the most popular and useful server software.