What NOT to do with your hosted Mac
The shortlist of actions that will cost you uptime and a remote-hands ticket.
Your Mac lives in a vBoxx data centre — Amsterdam, Naaldwijk, or Frankfurt if you opted in. There is no monitor in front of it and no human waiting to hit the power button. The list below is about actions that are harmless on a desktop Mac and painful on a remote one. Most need a physical visit to recover from, which takes time and can incur remote-hands fees.
Don't shut the Mac down
There is no "remote power on" button on a Mac. If you shut it down (deliberately or by accident), we have to walk to the rack and press the button. Reboot is fine. Shutdown is not.
Don't disable Remote Management
Remote Management is what gives you VNC / Screen Sharing. Turn it off and there is no way to turn it back on remotely. System Settings → General → Sharing → Remote Management must stay on, unless you intentionally rely on SSH only — in which case test SSH before disabling VNC.
Don't disable Remote Login (SSH)
Same logic. Losing both VNC and SSH locks you out completely.
Don't enable FileVault blindly
FileVault parks the Mac at a password screen on every boot. On most macOS versions there is no network at that screen — your Mac becomes a brick until somebody plugs in a keyboard. Read Should I enable FileVault? before flipping the switch.
Don't enable automatic macOS updates
A stuck installer on a server you can't see is the worst kind of outage. Schedule updates manually and watch the boot.
Don't change the network configuration
Your Mac receives its public IP via DHCP from our network. Hard-coding an IP, switching to a different interface, or installing a VPN that captures all traffic can take the Mac off the network. We then need a console session to fix it.
Don't disable the firewall and leave services exposed
If you don't want a firewall, fine — but at minimum restrict SSH to known source IPs and tunnel VNC through SSH. See Firewall guide.
If you have any doubt, open a ticket before you change something — we'd rather answer a quick question than do remote hands at 02:00.