This is 100% the way to go. I spun up a new server for a public-facing site on my VPS and I wondered if I really needed fail2ban. Within ten minutes of setting it up it had already blocked four people.

Don’t open port 22 if you can help it. Use it on your local network and VPN in if you need to use it offsite.

I had to delete the directory and make sure the file existed and was named what it should be named, but then it worked. But yeah, should be a file.

Ghost is self-hostable, easy-to-use, and looks beautiful. (Good) themes are usually a one-time payment, and they definitely have photoblog ones.

I use both Ghost and Wordpress for my sites and, while it’s not as infinitely customizable as Wordpress, Ghost is also not as needlessly complex, vulnerable, or time-intensive.

Do the comments ever load reliably? For me that would be a dealbreaker…

How is your RAM/storage usage? I’m interested in setting up my own instance (no communities, just a username that will always be here) but don’t want to upgrade my VPS again. I already had to do that spinning up a Mastodon server.