This is another in a short series of blog posts that will be brought together like Voltron to make something even cooler, but it’s useful on its own.

I’ve written about using a couple other cloud providers before, like AWS and the HP cloud, but I haven’t actually mentioned Digital Ocean yet, which is strange, because they’ve been my go-to cloud provider for the past year or so. As you can see on their technology page, all of their instances are SSD backed, they’re virtualized with KVM, they’ve got IPv6 support, and there’s an API for when you need to automate instance creation.

To be honest, I’m not automating any of it. What I use it for is one-off tests. Spinning up a new “droplet” takes less than a minute, and unlike AWS, where there are a ton of choices, I click about three buttons and get a usable machine for whatever I’m doing.

To get the most out of it, the first step you need to do is to generate an SSH key if you don’t have one already. If you don’t set up key-based authentication, you’ll get the root password for your instance in your email, but ain’t nobody got time for that, so create the key using ssh-keygen (or if you’re on Windows, I conveniently covered setting up key-based authentication using pageant the other day — it’s almost like I’d planned this out).

Next, sign up for Digital Ocean. You can do this at DigitalOcean.com or you can get $10 for free by using my referral link (and I’ll get $25 in credit eventually). Once you’re logged in, you can create a droplet by clicking the big friendly button:

This takes you to a relatively limited number of options — but limited in this case isn’t bad. It means you can spin up what you want without fussing about most of the details. You’ll be asked for your droplet’s hostname (which will be used to refer to the instance both in the Digital Ocean interface and will actually be set to to the hostname of the created machine), you’ll need to specify the size of the machine you want (and at the current moment, here are the prices:)

The $10/mo option is conveniently highlighted, but honestly, most of my test stuff runs perfectly fine on the $5/mo, and most of my test stuff never runs for more than an hour, and 7/1000 of a dollar seems like a good deal to me. Even if you screw up and forget about it, it’s $5/mo. Just don’t set up a 64GB monster and leave that bad boy running.

Next there are several regions. For me, New York 3 is automatically selected, but I can override that default choice if I want. I just leave it, because I don’t care. You might care, especially if you’re going to be providing a service to someone in Europe or Asia.

The next options are for settings like Private Networking, IPv6, backups, and user data. Keep in mind that backups cost money (duh?), so don’t enable that feature for anything you don’t want to spend 20% of your monthly fee on.

The next option is honestly why I love Digital Ocean so much. The image selection is so painless and easy that it puts AWS to shame. Here:

You can see that the choice defaults to Ubuntu current stable, but look at the other choices! Plus, see that Applications tab? Check this out:

I literally have a GitLab install running permanently in Digital Ocean, and the sum total of my efforts were 5 seconds of clicking that button, and $10/mo (it requires a gig of RAM to run the software stack). So easy.

It doesn’t matter what you pick for spinning up a test instance, so you can go with the Ubuntu default or pick CentOS, or whatever you’d like. Below that selection, you’ll see the option for adding SSH keys. By default, you won’t have any listed, but you have a link to add a key, which pops open a text box where you can paste your public key text. The key(s) that you select will be added to the root user’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file, so that you can connect in without knowing the password. The machine can then be configured however you want. (Alternately, when selecting which image to spin up, you can spin up a previously-saved snapshot, backup, or old droplet which can be pre-configured (by you) to do what you need).

Click Create Droplet, and around a minute later, you’ll have a new entry in your droplet list that gives you the public IP to connect to. If you spun up a vanilla OS, SSH into it as the root user with one of the keys you specified, and if you selected one of the apps from the menu, try connecting to it over HTTP or HTTPS.

That’s really about it. In an upcoming entry, we’ll be playing with a Digital Ocean droplet to do some cool stuff, but I wanted to get this out here so that you could start playing with it, if you don’t already. Make sure to remember, though, whenever you’re done with your machine, you need to destroy it, rather than just shut it down. Shutting it down makes it unavailable, but keeps the data around, and that means you’ll keep getting billed for it. Destroy it and that erases the data and removes the instance, which is what causes you to be billed.

Have fun, and let me know if you have any questions!