A website for an auto repair shop, on its own hardened server

NAME

auto-repair-website — A website for an auto repair shop, on its own hardened server

A website that takes customer requests, on a small server locked down and checked across three restarts.

An owner-run auto repair shop. The shop had no website that took requests, and nobody on staff to look after a server.

Built a website that takes customer requests and sends them straight to the shop.
Put the site on its own small virtual server. Web traffic is accepted only through the DNS provider’s proxy, with a one-command switch to reopen direct access if that provider has an outage.
Hardened the server: key-only SSH, automatic bans for repeated failed sign-ins, kernel network protections, and SSH over IPv6 closed outright.
Nightly backups, with a copy kept off the server.
Registered the domain in the shop’s own name, with a written handover path.

Measure	Before	After
Hardening still active after a restart	not tested	3 of 3 restarts
Kernel protections inactive on the live network interface	2	0

Restarted the server three times and re-checked every protection after each one, rather than trusting the configuration files.
Found two kernel settings that read as correct but were inactive on the server’s only real network interface, and fixed them with a start-up job that sets every interface.
Found that a firewall reload silently removed active bans. Bans are now written through the firewall itself, so they survive a reload.
Ran the search-engine checks against a server that was switched off first, to prove each check can actually fail.