Moving to Digital Ocean – The beginners guide

A few weeks ago I made my decision to move from my hosting company. I couldn’t handle constant down times, unanswered tickets. I figured I should step up my game and take my virtual private server into my hands – switching from managed to non managed VPS hosting. Digital Ocean seemed like a good choice.

You can access their website at:

• digitalocean.com (clean link)
• digitalocean.com (link with my referral code)

I didn’t know where to start, so I looked up guides and messed up things and started over and pulled my hair a little, but it’s 100% worth it. I took notes of everything I did, and after finally understanding a few things I figured I should make an all-in-one guide for those who would like to do the same without experience.

So in this step-by-step series I will try to save you some time by sharing my experiences with Digital Ocean by setting up an Ubuntu droplet with LAMP stack, which is probably the most beginner friendly approach to a self managed VPS.

Please note, that my knowledge with linux commands was almost nothing, so if I could do it, you can do it.

Many of the articles are based on their tutorials, which are very informative, and also based on various other sources as a result of vigorous googling for solutions.

Begin with the First Chapter, or you can check the chapters list.

Chapters

• Introduction
• Chapter #1 – Preparation & Backup
• Chapter #2 – Droplet Setup
• Chapter #3 – SSH and Users
• Chapter #4 – Virtual Hosts
• Chapter #5 – phpMyAdmin
• Chapter #6 – FTP & SFTP
• Chapter #7 – Mailing
• Chapter #8 – Swap file
• Chapter #9 – Saving space automatically

Chapter #1 >>

Best of luck!