Report this

What is the reason for this report?

What’s the best way to secure a DigitalOcean Droplet running WordPress against brute-force attacks?

Posted on August 29, 2025

I have a WordPress site hosted on a DigitalOcean Droplet (Ubuntu 22.04, Nginx, PHP 8.2, MySQL). Lately I’ve been noticing a lot of failed login attempts in the logs, which look like brute-force attacks on wp-login.php.

So far, I’ve:

  • Enabled fail2ban

  • Installed a basic security plugin on WordPress

  • Changed the default admin username

But the attempts keep coming.

My questions:

  • Are there additional steps I should take on the server level (firewall rules, SSH configs, rate limiting)?

  • Is it better to block these at Nginx/iptables level or just rely on plugins?

  • Any recommended best practices specific to WordPress on DigitalOcean?



This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.