VPS Morning Checkup

VPS Morning Server Checkup

Every morning, before the day kicks off, I run a light-touch health check on our Sydney Business Web VPS. It takes only a few minutes, but the insights are invaluable — especially when you’re running multiple WooCommerce, membership and business sites that depend on speed and stability.

✅ What We Checked This Morning

Today’s test was a beauty. CPU load sat comfortably below 0.8 across six cores, memory was steady at 36%, and swap usage was sitting right where we expect it — around 49%. Nothing unusual. Exactly what you want to see in the morning.

Next, I checked for failed SSH login attempts. For the first time in months, the result was:

none

That’s almost unheard of for a public-facing VPS. Normally, you’ll see constant password-guessing bots hammering away. Today, nothing — and that tells us everything we need to know: our firewall measures are working.

✅ Why the Logs Look So Clean Now

Yesterday, we identified several noisy scrapers — Dataprovider, Hetzner-based scanners, and a few opportunistic crawlers probing sites they have no business touching.

Each one was tracked, analysed, confirmed, and then dropped immediately into our CSF/IPSET instant-deny system — which blocks them before they ever reach PHP, WordPress, WooCommerce or anything else that costs CPU time.

This is exactly the sort of proactive defence that keeps a VPS from silently eating 30–40% CPU all day long due to “invisible” traffic.

✅ Cloudflare vs VPS Firewall — Why the VPS Wins

We use Cloudflare where it makes sense — for caching, CDN performance, R2 video delivery, and global speed. But when it comes to actual server protection, Cloudflare can’t replace what we’ve built on the VPS — even if you’re on a paid Cloudflare plan.

Why Cloudflare Alone Can’t Match This Defence

• Cloudflare only sees traffic at the edge. It can’t see what touches PHP, MySQL, XML-RPC, admin-ajax, WooCommerce endpoints, or plugin/theme behaviour.
• Cloudflare cannot analyse your server logs. It has zero awareness of:
  • Apache hits
  • SSH brute-force attempts
  • slow PHP workers
  • CPU or SWAP surges
  • pattern-based scrapers that Cloudflare considers “benign”
• Cloudflare allows “good bots” that can still drain resources.
  Dataprovider, Amazon AWS scrapers, Hetzner crawlers — Cloudflare won’t block them unless you create explicit rules, and even then many are forced through as “non-malicious”.
• Your server firewall understands the workload.
  Your VPS knows what hurts — admin-ajax hammering, WooCommerce loops, MySQL-heavy requests — and shuts them down ruthlessly.
• CSF/IPSET blocks faster than Cloudflare. Cloudflare filters, but the request still traverses their network and reaches your origin unless cached. IPSET drops the packet BEFORE Apache even wakes up.

So What’s the Best Setup?

Use Cloudflare + VPS Firewall together. Cloudflare handles global speed, CDN, optimisation, and caching. Your VPS firewall handles the deep packet, pattern-based, CPU-aware defence that Cloudflare can’t touch.

✅ What This Means for Our Clients

This is exactly why hosting your site with us is different from cheap shared hosting. You’re getting:

• Enterprise-level bot protection without the enterprise price tag
• Massive reductions in CPU noise (faster sites, fewer slowdowns)
• Active daily monitoring — not “set and forget”
• Hardening that looks more like a corporate firewall than a small business VPS

None of this is automated (yet). It’s hands-on, eyes-on protection — and it makes an enormous difference.

✅ Coming Soon: Automated Daily Bot Report

I’m now building an automated script that will generate a daily report showing:

• Top hitting IPs
• Any new suspicious patterns
• Failed SSH attempts
• CPU and SWAP anomalies
• Auto-block recommendations

Once it’s operational, I’ll share the results and offer the system to our clients as part of our managed hosting stack.

✅ Tomorrow’s Check

Tomorrow, we’ll continue with a lighter touch routine: log sweep, slow query scan, and any anomalies that appear overnight. If anything weird pops up, we’ll deep-dive it as usual.

This is the difference between hosting and managed hosting — and it’s why our clients’ sites stay fast, safe, and online.