In this chapter we’ll provision a new VPS at DigitalOcean with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. We’ll login to the server via SSH, configure the hostname and timezone, install software updates, and set up automatic security updates. Then we’ll create a new sudo user, set up SSH login with keys instead of a password, and disable SSH for the root user. We’ll also install a firewall and fail2ban to protect against intrusion attempts.