Nexardo / Blog
Setup guides, diagnostics and practical decisions for running games on your own VPS.
Engineering
External synthetic monitoring for game servers using Prometheus and Blackbox Exporter: probing TCP sockets, validating HTTPS administration consoles, latency metrics, and relabeling.
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Automating game server offsite backups to S3 storage: configuring rclone, multi-threaded zstd compression without tick drops, VPS disaster recovery, and 14-day archive retention.
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Hardening game server SSH against brute-force attacks: Ed25519 authentication, disabling root and password access, changing port to 2222, and automated IP bans with fail2ban.
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Configure an Nginx reverse proxy with automated Let's Encrypt SSL certificates for game panels: localhost isolation, WebSocket proxying, and rate limits.
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Game server infrastructure monitoring with Prometheus: CPU/RAM tracking with node_exporter, tick rate observation, and automated Telegram alert rules.
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Protect your Linux game server against UDP floods and volumetric attacks using nftables: rate limiting, connection tracking, and invalid packet drops.
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Automated game server world backups on Linux: parallel zstd compression, systemd timer scheduling, and retention policy pruning.
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Auto-restart crashed game servers via systemd: configuring Restart=on-failure, mitigating crash storms with burst limits, and save timeouts.
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Game server maintenance window procedures: player alerts, cold snapshot verification, SteamCMD updates, and immediate rollback criteria.
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Migrate a dedicated game server to another VPS with zero downtime: two-phase rsync staging, save delta transfers, and service validation.
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Diagnose game server disk exhaustion on Linux: inode validation, locating unlinked open files with lsof, and safe journal vacuuming.
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Size a game server VPS from actual workload demands: single-core IPC over core count, tiered RAM budgeting, and NVMe IOPS throughput.
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