Web Hosts will have their “in-house” repositories setup, which is why your typical “sudo apt-get update” command can have varying results. If you ever need the latest version of something you should refer to the developers site and following their instructions on how to add a dedicated repository or build the package from scratch. Again, out of scope for this forum.
I hate Varnish with a passion. The reverse proxy is an incredibly annoying workaround just to make it work with SSL. Plus, I don’t like how Varnish is perceived as a “set and forget” solution for caching. You literally have to micro-managed and “hole-punch” part of your Frontend so that:
- It full caches what it needs to
- It doesn’t cache things like Prices and Basket contents
You see this now on some Magento stores where you’ll visit a site and be like “I don’t remember adding anything to my basket?”. And in actual fact you’re seeing the Basket contents for someone else that happened to get cached.
Right now, I’m sticking with a LAMP stack unless my site traffic becomes exponential. But that’s my personal preference based on my experiences, not advice.
- I haven’t done a video on setting up SMTP on a server yet, as this is something I’ve never needed to do. But it’s on my list of things to research and do.
- Just use SFTP (Port 22) for File Transferring. Don’t bother setting up FTP (Port 20) as it’s less secure. Plus, SFTP just works out the box without any configuration.
- I’ll never install any “bloatware” like Control Panels. They just complicate things.
- Security Hardening other than what I’ve covered in the past is kind of out of my scope in this forum as you’re going into https://unix.stackexchange.com/ territory at this point.
- SSL/TLS is kind of covered here (How to setup Let’s Encrypt Free SSL Certificate with Magento 2), but again any Apache/Nginx tweaking you should refer to the link above - Plus any best practices on the latest TLS versions vs browser compatibility.