Keeping your MySQL server backup as current as possible is important. I’ve seen (and have done this myself) people backup using mysqldump once a day, week, or month without any backups in-between. There are a few problems with backing up your database this way. The first problem is that running mysqldump is very slow on large databases and could lockup your website for a significant portion of time. Secondly, you can lose all data that occurred since the previous backup.

Below is a glossary of terms often times used when discussing Virtual Private Servers, web hosting, and networking. Knowing what these following terms mean should help you navigate hosting provider websites and tutorials. Not all of the following terms are concrete in meaning and could be used to mean a slightly different concept. The glossary below is ordered alphabetically and tries to focus only on terms used when discussing virtual private servers.

Having a VPS provider that offers internal IP addresses and internal networking can greatly improve your app or website performance by removing the network latency between servers. In addition to improved performance, an internal IP address you can help improve your servers security by not publicly exposing services to the public. Keep in mind that some internal networks have other VPS clients on the same subnet. These clients can access your internal IP address.

There are times when you need to connect to your MySQL or MariaDB remotely but don’t want to enable remote connections on the server. The solution is to use SSH tunneling with OpenSSH. SSH tunneling works by forwarding requests from a client port to the SSH server. The SSH server will then forward the request to the destination which can be itself or any other host the SSH server can access.

SSH is the most valuable tool to manage your servers. As you already know, SSH allows you to remotely connect to your server and access a shell. With the power SSH possess, it’s important to protect SSH to ensure the only trusted people are able to connect. This post will go through the SSH configuration settings that need to be modified to help protect your server. Editing SSHD Configuration Files To prevent this tutorial from repeating itself too frequently, here is an overview of how to edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.