Networking & Delivery
VPC
A private, isolated network within a cloud provider where your resources communicate securely without exposing traffic to the public internet.
A VPC is your own isolated network inside a provider's cloud. Your servers, databases, and load balancers talk to each other over private addresses that never touch the public internet, and you control the subnets, routing, and firewall rules. It's how you keep a database off the open internet while still letting your app server reach it.
The practical win is security and often cost. Traffic between resources in the same VPC usually doesn't count against bandwidth billing, and a database with no public IP simply can't be attacked from outside. DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, and Hetzner all offer private networking, sometimes free, sometimes as a VPC feature.
So put anything that doesn't need a public address behind the VPC. Databases, caches, and internal services should be reachable only from your other servers, not from the entire internet. Exposing them publicly is a common and dangerous default to leave in place.
Go deeper
- Cloud Hosting Security: What's Your Job vs the Provider'sThe shared responsibility model, and the specific things people forget to configure.