What is vFirewall?

vFirewall moves firewall protection out of your VPS and onto the infrastructure layer. Instead of configuring and maintaining iptables, ufw, firewalld, or any other firewall software, your traffic is filtered before it ever reaches your server.

That means one less service running on your server, one less thing that can be misconfigured, and one less digital asset to defend.

The vFirewall Advantage

“Just as our VPS service is deployed in seconds upon order, we wanted the Firewall service to be just as effortless. Not everyone in our clientele is an experienced server administrator, so we went the extra mile to make vFirewall easy to configure, without requiring advanced server skills or in-depth technical knowledge.”
Yiota Pingou – CTO, NetShop ISP

No installation, no maintenance – Traditional firewalls reside inside the operating system, competing for CPU and memory, and requiring careful rule management to avoid accidentally locking yourself out. vFirewall eliminates that entirely. There’s nothing to install, patch, or break.

Enhanced security by default – Filtering happens before the traffic reaches the VPS so malicious packets are stopped at a layer above the VPS. This minimizes the window for exploitation, even if the VPS operating system has vulnerabilities.

Simple, centralized management – Manage all your firewall rules from myNetShop, the intuitive self-service control panel. Whether your VPS is running on Ubuntu, Almalinux, Debian, or Windows, you are dealing with one simple interface to manage the firewall rules for all.

Zero performance overhead on the VPS – Since the firewall rules enforcement happens at a network level, your VPS’s resources are dedicated entirely to the applications, not to filtering traffic.

Available Now on VPS PRO Plans

vFirewall is included with all VPS Pro packages (fixed-specs and Flexi) at no additional cost.

For instructions on how to use vFirewall please read this tutorial. For any questions, clarifications or further information please contact us at any time.

Quick background for anyone who hasn’t run into it yet: Hermes Agent is Nous Research’s open-source, self-hosted agent. Not a model – an actual agent application, with its own CLI, memory, and a “skills” system, that you point at whichever model you want underneath (their own Hermes models, Claude, GPT, whatever you’ve got API access to). That distinction trips people up constantly, so it’s worth getting straight before anything else.

Getting Hermes Agent running

The install is a single line:

root@localhost:~$ curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash

That pulls down Python, Node, ripgrep, ffmpeg, and everything else it needs, and drops the whole thing into ~/.hermes/hermes-agent.

Once it’s done, reload your shell and run hermes –tui to open the terminal interface. First thing it asks is which model to use – we pointed ours at a hosted Hermes model through Nous Portal for the general agent work, though you can just as easily wire in Claude or ChatGPT if that’s what you’re already paying for.

If you’d rather keep it boxed off from the rest of the server, there’s a Docker path too:

root@localhost:~$ mkdir -p ~/.hermes

and then run:

root@localhost:~$ docker run -it --rm -v ~/.hermes:/opt/data nousresearch/hermes-agent setup

That -v ~/.hermes:/opt/data bit matters as it’s the only place Hermes keeps its state (config, memory, skills, logs), so mapping it to a folder on the host means a container restart doesn’t wipe anything.

What we actually use Hermes Agent for

Log screening – You can point Hermes agent at a log file and ask it directly: “summarize the last 200 lines of /var/log/nginx/error.log” . It will read the contents of the file and give you a summary of what happened, not a wall of raw lines.

Skills instead of one-off scripts – Skills are just instruction files that teach the agent how to do a specific job: deploy something, generate a report, run a specific check. You can browse what’s already out there, search by keyword, and install a skill straight from the hub, for example: hermes skills search kubernetes

Talking to it from somewhere other than a terminal. Hermes gateway setup walks you through connecting Telegram, Slack, Discord, or a handful of others. This is useful if you want people to be able to use without having to ssh on a server!

It remembers things. You can show Hermes agent how to fix something once and it holds onto that. For example, you can ask it to restart mysql service after as specific failure. You can ask it again weeks later, and it already knows the context, instead of starting from scratch like a normal chatbot would.

Hermes Agent Use Cases

Here are some use cases of Hermes Agent shared by people, showing the different ways it’s changed how they work.

Personal Assistant
“every weekday at 9am, summarize my inbox and post to Slack,” and it creates the schedule. No config files. No cron syntax.” Read more >

Content Creation
“I use Hermes to generate tweet threads from my past YouTube scripts, then start a brand new session and watch it recall everything without me re-uploading a single file.” Read more >

Security
“I’ve put together a skill to protect against some of the common LLM / AI threats and some of my recommended security policies that are being used to good effect on other AI agent tools.” Read more >

Why run Hermes Agent on a VPS instead of a laptop

A dedicated VPS keeps the agent, its memory, and its skills available whenever you need them, reachable over Telegram or SSH from anywhere, without occupying your own machine or losing state every time you close a session.

It’s also just easier to give a whole team access to one shared agent running on shared infrastructure than to have everyone running their own local copy with no shared memory between them.

Get Hermes Agent on a VPS in just One Click

NetShop’s newly launched Hermes Agent VPS product brings the popular AI agent to you in just one click. No need to have linux or server adminstration experience. Just pick a plan through the Hermes Agent VPS page and it’s ready to go, pre-configured and reachable from wherever you work.

We didn’t want Hermes to be something you had to fight to set up. Self-hosting an AI agent usually means wrestling with GPU drivers, Docker configuration, and lots of other installation dependencies. That’s the opposite of what most businesses want from their infrastructure provider.

If you have been keeping an eye on the AI space, you’ll know that “agents” are the new hot trend. Most of what gets called an agent is really just a chatbot with a few extra hooks bolted on. Hermes isn’t that. It’s built on Nous Research’s open-weight Hermes models, and it’s designed to get things done – not just answer questions about them.

What is Hermes Agent?

Hermes is an open-source AI agent framework that runs entirely on your own infrastructure (self-hosted). Unlike the AI tools most businesses use today, nothing about how Hermes works requires sending your data off to a third party. The model, the conversation history, the documents it reads, the commands it runs – all of it stays on your server, under your control.

“At NetShop ISP, we believe in data sovereignty. In fact, it’s deeply embedded in our DNA hence we’ve been helping businesses keep their data regional through our worldwide data center infrastructure for the past 22 years.”, said Stefano Sordini, CEO at NetShop ISP

That distinction matters more than it might sound. If your business handles client contracts, financial records, trading data, or anything else you’d rather not hand to an external API, running your own agent changes the conversation entirely. You get the benefits of AI assistance without the compliance headache of a third party holding your data.

What Hermes Agent Can Do

Once you get your Hermes AI Agent VPS is up and running, you can start getting it to do almost any repetitive or research-heavy task your team deals with day to day:

• Emails filtering – reading, categorising, and drafting first-pass responses to incoming emails or tickets.
• Log and monitoring summaries – optimizing a tsunami of server logs or alerts into a plain-English summary of what actually needs attention
• Document search and internal knowledge base – answering questions from your own runbooks, wikis, and internal docs instead of generic training data
• Content and drafting support – producing first drafts of client communications, reports, or internal documentation
• Website and SEO auditing – crawling and assessing your own site for search and AI-answer-engine readiness

Something which we, at NetShop ISP, love about Hermes agent is its orientation for technical teams. It ships with a proper CLI, supports tool integrations and skills you can install on demand, and can be connected into an existing infrastructure.

Deploy your first Hermes AI Agent in One Click

Deployment works exactly like the rest of our VPS products: choose your desired Hermes Agent VPS plan from our website, proceed to checkout and deploy. Within minutes you will have a running agent, ready to be pointed at whatever task you want to hand it first.

If you are not sure where and how to start, please contact us and we will get in touch to assist further.

2026 is an interesting year in the sphere of cyber security. Attackers increasingly use AI-assisted tools to script attacks, probe defenses in real time, and rotate vectors the moment mitigation kicks in – turning what used to be a blunt flood into an adaptive, multi-layer campaign that hits the network and application layers simultaneously.

Hyper-volumetric attacks measured in multiple terabits per second, once rare, are now recorded regularly, while a large share of application-layer attacks last only seconds or minutes; just long enough to cause disruption before defenses can react.

Downtime is expensive. Industry surveys consistently put the cost of an hour of downtime well into five figures for many businesses, and the damage isn’t limited to lost transactions; it includes reputational harm and SEO impact that can take months to recover from. Protecting your website is no longer a “nice to have” but a necessity.

In this article we break down the concrete steps to make your infrastructure resilient in 2026.

1. Use Dedicated DDoS Mitigation Services

Standard firewalls are not built to absorb large or sustained attacks. Purpose-built mitigation platforms typically combine:

• Automated, always-on detection
• Real-time traffic scrubbing
• Behavioral and anomaly-based analysis
• Coverage across volumetric, protocol, and application-layer attack types

NetShop’s Advanced DDoS Protection comes as fully managed and supports detection at all layers (L1 – L7). Check out the DDoS Protections plans here.

2. Deploy CDN for Global Traffic Distribution

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) spreads incoming requests across many global points of presence, absorbing traffic surges before they reach your origin server.

Some of the benefits of adopting CDN into your infrastructure are:

• Faster load times for legitimate visitors
• Extra bandwidth headroom during traffic spikes
• Reduced load on your origin infrastructure
• Built-in redundancy against regional attack concentration

3. Implement Rate Limiting and Traffic Shaping

Application-layer (Layer 7) attacks are harder to detect because the traffic looks legitimate. What ddos appliances used to easily detect two years ago, today is becoming ten times harder.

Rate limiting and traffic shaping help contain:

• Credential-stuffing and login abuse
• API request floods (a growing target, especially for smaller businesses)
• Aggressive scraping
• Low-and-slow Layer 7 attacks designed to exhaust backend resources rather than bandwidth

4. Harden Your Web Server Configuration

Server-level hardening remains one of the highest-return, lowest-cost defenses:

• Disable unused services and ports
• Adjust connection limits and timeouts
• Enable and configure caching
• Run efficient web servers (Nginx, LiteSpeed) configured for high-concurrency loads

Fine-tuning as well as security hardening are services provided as part of NetShop’s Managed SLA plans.

5. Use a Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Because so much of today’s attack volume targets the application layer, a WAF is essential rather than optional. It should block:

• Malformed or malicious HTTP requests
• Repetitive, bot-like request patterns
• Known exploit signatures (including protocol-level exploits like HTTP/2 stream abuse)
• High-frequency POST/API floods

NetShop ISP offers two types of Firewalls; virtual and hardware. Both come as self-managed or fully managed, standalone or in high-availability mode.

6. Strengthen DNS Resilience

DNS remains a preferred target because taking down DNS takes down your site even if hosting itself is healthy. You can reduce this exposure by:

• Using multiple, geographically distributed DNS providers
• Enabling DNSSEC
• Filtering abusive or misconfigured resolvers
• Choosing DNS providers with built-in DDoS protection

A premium DNS hosting service supporting DNSSEC, failover, and Geo-based load balancing of requests can help you strengthen your infrastructure’s resilience.

7. Build and Test an Incident Response Plan

No defense is perfect, and a fast, rehearsed response minimizes damage when an attack gets through. As per best practices we have been implemented both internally and to various organizations, your incident response plan should define:

• Emergency contacts and escalation paths
• Monitoring thresholds that trigger action
• Internal and external communication steps
• Failover and rollback procedures
• Regular simulated-attack drills so teams respond with confidence under real pressure

Key takeaways for your Website’s Protection from DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks in 2026 are bigger, faster, and more adaptive than ever. The organizations that stay resilient are the ones that combine infrastructure-level protection (mitigation services, CDN, DNS resilience) with application-layer hardening (WAF, rate limiting, server tuning) and a tested incident response plan.

Choosing a hosting provider with built-in DDoS protection, scalable infrastructure, and security-focused support can make a real difference when an attack hits.

Explore our hosting security solutions to protect your platform in 2026 and beyond, or contact us to schedule a free consultation with our cybersecurity and infrastructure specialists.