Server hosting for Noobs

My First Digital Ocean Droplet

As a start for codelab project, I decided to start my own cloud server or VPS to be exact. This page served as my journal to explore into server hosting.

Create Droplet (VPS)

I have chosen Digital Ocean VPS provider as my service provider . There are many tutorials out there providing guide on account registering and starting up droplet (Digital Ocean is referring VPS node as droplet).

It is pretty simple to setup a droplet in Digital Ocean.


Step 1 : Register 
Register an account at Digital Ocean and then login into your DO account.

Step 2 : Create droplets
Create droplets.

D.O offered have 3 options to create a droplet:

•  Linux distribution - plain linux distribution
• Container - For docker and container type application
• One-click app - Linux with pre-installed application tailored for specific use case such as web hosting, etc.

Step 3 : Choose your Linux flavor
For testing, plain linux VPS shall served the purpose. Choose the Ubuntu 16.04 x32 distributions. It is a matter of preference to choose this distribution. All other distribution shall work as well.

Recommendation: If you are going to create low specification droplet with lGB memory, go for 32 bit distribution.


Step 4 : VPS specification - CPU, RAM and Harddisk

Step 5 : Choose datacenter region

As a rule of thumb, choose the datacenter in the same region or nearest region to you.

Step 6 : Done
Give your droplet a name and click Create. The droplet creation will take less than a minute to complete.

Congratulations, the first droplet is created. Password for root access will be emailed to you.

Digital Ocean provide free credits for first time user to try out their services.  :)
Click here to sign up a free account with Digital Ocean and get started with $10 free credit.