Ask HN: How do you maintain your personal hosted server/vm?

Everyone have their personal hosted server or vm where you host or plan to host personal projects.

how do you maintain it? How do you keep it secure and up to date?

i'm right now giving up and going with a solution that keeps everything local and everytime i push an update to my code it also wipes down the VMS and start fresh. but i figure smarter people have already solved this problem more efficiently...