The first thing that we need to do is navigate to Digital Ocean home page. You can use this link digitalocean.com or you can also use this referral link
By using this referral link, you'll be also redirected to DO homepage, but once you've Signed up you'll get free $50 credit so that you can play around for free for a month.
Then You can create new account by hitting the Sign Up button on the top right. Go ahead and fill in the form and then hit Sign Up button. Once you've sign up you'll receive an email to verify your account.
Go to your email and hit the verification link to verify your account.
Once you've signed up you can login with your account. Then you can go to the top right and hit the Create button then hit Droplets. This will take you to Create Droplets page.
As noted in digital ocean official guide, Droplets are flexible Linux-based virtual machines (VMs) that run on top of virtualized hardware. Each Droplet you create is a new server you can use.
In Create Droplets page you'll find some Linux distributions. In this guide let's choose Ubuntu and we're going to use version 18.04 which is the LTS (Long Term Support) version.
Next, On Choose a plan section you can choose the droplet specification that you need. In my case I'll choose the cheapest one ($5/month).
Then, in Datacenter section you can choose where your droplet will be placed. In my case I'll choose Singapore.
In Authentication section you'll find two authentication options. If you choose SSH Keys you will be able to login to your server through SSH without need to enter your account's password at all. To choose this option make sure you have configure ssh key in your local machine.
If you choose One-time Password, once you've created the droplet you'll receive an email from Digital Ocean contains information to login to your server.
We'll learn how to configure SSH key in the future lesson. So for now let's choose the One-time Password option
In in Finalize and Create section you can specify how many droplets that you want to create. In this case we can leave it as 1 Droplet. You can then enter a hostname for your droplet in Choose a hostname. In my case I'll call it my-laravel-demo.
You can optionally enter some tags for your droplet in Add tags input box and assign the droplet to specific project by select it in Select Project.
You can finally hit the Create button to actually create the Droplet and It will take some times to process. Once it's done you'll see your created droplet in Resources section.
You will also receive an email contains the Droplet name along with IP address, username and password that you can use to login through SSH.
Now you can switch over to your Terminal (or Cmd for Windows). Then login to your server by saying ssh root@ then enter the IP Address of your droplet that you could see in your email:
ssh root@128.199.161.82
Answer yes then hit return if you found confirmation message. When you have password prompt you can go back to your email and copy the password. Paste the password in and then hit return.
Once you've successfully login, you'll find welcome message along with System information of your droplet. You'll also asked to change the root password with the new one. You can simply paste again the current password in (current) UNIX password input.
You can then enter your new strong password in Enter new UNIX password and Retype new UNIX password inputs.
Once that done you'll find a prompt in format like this root@droplet-hostname.
