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Depending on your time zone, PHP 7 was finally released on 3rd/4th of December 2015. Even though the general recommendation for production servers is to wait for a little bit and gather some experiences before upgrading, some of us want to jump right on and upgrade to PHP 7.
Experimental support for HTTP/2 became available in Nginx version 1.9.5 (mainline). It is really easy to enable, and I’ll show you how.
Since version 3.9, WordPress have been 100% compatible with [HHVM](http://hhvm.com/ "HipHop Virtual Machine") and I have begun replacing PHP with it on a few of my servers to experiment.
Now that you have secured [Nginx with HTTPS](https://www.bjornjohansen.com/securing-nginx-ssl) and [enabled SPDY](https://www.bjornjohansen.com/enabling-spdy-nginx) [enabled HTTP/2](https://www.bjornjohansen.com/enable-http2-on-nginx), it's time to improve both the security and the performance of the server.
I always run the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on all my servers. Unfortunately, the Nginx versions tend to be quite the bit behind the current release. So how do you get an updated, current version of without resorting to having to maintain the packages yourself? Luckily, the Nginx team have their own Ubuntu apt repository so it’s easy to keep current with the latest version of Nginx.
I always run the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on all my servers. Currently the latest LTS is 14.04 which comes with PHP version 5.5, but as of November 2014, the latest stable version is 5.6. So how do you get an updated, current version of PHP without resorting to having to maintain the packages yourself? The answer is in PPA.
When it comes to VPNs, there is the choice between PPTP and OpenVPN. PPTP is pretty quick to setup and works out of the box with most (all?) OSes and devices.
These are the first steps you should perform on your shiny, brand new VPS to set out on a safe journey on the internets. You don't actually have to understand each of the steps here, but this post is intented for people who have some clue of what they're doing. If there is such a thing as a «VPSes for dummies», it should not be read. VPSes are not intended for dummies.