In this tutorial we will be discussing how to create and install an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server at DigitalOcean. A server instance at DigitalOcean is called a droplet.
0. Account + Billing
Create an account at DigitalOcean.com and transfer some money to it. This can be done by PayPal or creditcard.
1. Create droplet
Go to
https://cloud.digitalocean.com/droplets
and press the green ‘Create’ button
.
Hostname
You will be asked for a hostname. This does not have to be a working domain, you can make something up.
Select size
After that you will be asked to select a size for your droplet. You can resize everything but disk size later on the fly.
Select region
Now you will be asked to select a region. You can decide to take the region that is the closest to your home or to the home of most of your visitors. This way you reduce the amount of latency between the server and the visitors.
Note: At the moment not all the regions can be selected due to capacity issues.
Select image
Here you can select a image of a certain installation. For this tutorial we will choose Ubuntu 14.04 x64.
Settings
You can leave these at their default values. We don’t need them at this moment.
Create droplet
The create droplet button should be clickable now and after hitting it you will get a root password and ip in your mailbox.
2. Change some settings
SSH
You should have got an email with a root password and a IP address.
Windows users have to download Putty to login to their server by SSH.
Open Putty and fill in your IP address. Leave the rest default and click open.
You will be asked to trust the host, press ‘yes’.
Login
The server will ask ‘Login as: ‘.
Type root and press enter.
Now it will ask for a password. You can copy paste it from your email by copying it from the email and then pushing the right mouse button only once in the putty screen. Press enter now.
You will be asked to change your root password immediately. Please do so.