Knowledgebase

Error connecting to your VPS service can be fustrating

We will provide basic troubleshooting process within this article. 

Scenario 1: SSH connection established, but credentials do not work

This sometimes is a default configuration for certain operating systems, preventing root login,
this can be resolved by navigating to /etc/ssh/ and editing sshd_config file.
Within this file, you have to uncomment the line: PermitRootLogin and ensure it looks like so:

PermitRootLogin yes

Another quicker method is to directly change this data quickly with the command:

echo PermitRootLogin yes >> /etc/ssh/sshd_config

After this, you can restart SSH server.

Ubuntu/Debian based systems:
systemctl restart sshd

Scenario 2: SSH connection fails to establish

In this case, you must enable VNC. After logging in, the first step is to check the status of the SSH server.
This can be done with the command:

systemctl status sshd

If this is offline, you can start it up:

systemctl start sshd

If this continues to fail, you and the service is running, the next steps would be:

• Head to https://portchecker.co
• Input your server's IP and port 22 (default SSH port)
• If it is open, you can contact our support to take a closer look to the issue
• If it is not open, the next step would be to check whether the port is closed.
• To do this, visit https://my.abrhosting.com
• At the top, click Firewall Manager - if this option does not exist, please contact our support team.
• Once logged into the firewall manager, select the service IP (corner bottom left)
• Look for if the port 22 has a "holepunch" rule, if so, you can safely remove this.

If the above steps still prevents access to your service, please create a ticket and we will provide support.