Again, I wouldn't worry too much about getting hacked. Don't use bad or obvious passwords on your db or ssh account. Besides I would say much of the hacking sur

Again, I wouldn't worry too much about getting hacked. Don't use bad or obvious passwords on your db or ssh account. Besides I would say much of the hacking surface is going to be in your site's code, if it's in any way dynamic. You'll probably make mistakes. The biggest actual devops advice I can give is backup. Everything. Often enough so that if you lose everything since your last backup you can live with it. And again, it doesn't even have to be automated. Run mysqldump by hand and save the results away somewhere. Rsync your home directory away. If you have a dedicated server, rsync /etc, too. Having a backup is the solution to almost any catastrophic event in the devops world. Disk crash? Get a new disk, restore from backup, continue on. Hacked? Figure out how, fix security hole in code (or wherever), wipe server, change passwords, restore from backup, continue. I'm sure there are more. Having done devops work, most of the hard part is getting it to all run smoothly and automatically (big web sites have many many servers and slave dbs, and deploying to them all becomes complicated). But as a single person working on a small project, that's not the most important thing to optimize for, in my opinion. It's more important to get it done.