-- 7 min read

The beginning

Where to begin? nginx would be a good start I suppose. It’s far easier and makes much for sense for you to actually read about nginx from it’s own website - https://nginx.org/en/ - but just to give a simple explanation too; `nginx is king of static content HTTP servers.`

Anyone that has dealt with Apache on medium to high traffic websites will know that Apache is bit of a `wheezy, old geezer` when it comes to content serving using it’s mpm-worker (threaded). Very often high traffic will cause server load to go through the roof but for serving dynamic content, there really is no better HTTP server than Apache, so this leaves us in a bit of a predicament; a high powered website with dynamic content and lots of static files like JS, CSS and imagery, what do we do?!

In this example `dynamic …

 -- 4 min read

Server security is something I’ve always tried to keep myself up-to-date on. I have at least a dozen RSS feeds that I read daily to learn about the latest flaws, holes releases etc. That being said I am by no means an “expert”, I’ve learned what I’ve needed to learn over time. I like to think that over the years I’ve gained enough knowledge to almost completely secure servers with all the programs installed that I generally use.

The aim of this article is to introduce you to some of the programs I use for security and some config changes that can be made to other programs to make them more secure. It is aimed at web servers but other changes work anywhere, like the SSH changes.

SSH

We’ll start with a very simple change that makes a very big difference, a change to the …