Make First Connection to your Droplet

This is a step by step tutorial to create your first droplet and build first connection to the droplet using your windows machine. I am writing this tutorial in the view-point that, this is your first experience with a Droplet. Hence this tutorial would be simple and each step would be presented using screenshots.

Prerequisites

A digital ocean account with sufficient credit.
A local computer runs on Windows (or Linux).

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Tools needed

A SSH client (for local windows machine): In this tutorial, I am going to use PuTTY a free and open-source SSH client. You can download it by visiting here.

Okay, Let’s Start

Step 1: Create a Droplet

Log in to your DigitalOcean account. If you are login to DigitalOcean for the first time, you’ll be prompted to create a new Project. In this tutorial I am focusing on ServerSelf.

Then go to your project and click on “Create” button in upper right on the screen. Then a drop-down will immerge and select “Droplets” from that drop-down list.

After that, select your desired Linux distribution. In this tutorial, I am using Ubuntu 16.04.6 x64.

Then choose a plan. You can select plans from 5$/month on-wards. Higher the price, greater will be the resources (like Disk space, Bandwidth, RAM) allocated to your droplet. In this step, I am going to use 5$/month plan with 25GB disk space, 1GB RAM and 1TB Bandwidth.

Then if you like, you can enable automatic backup option. This will cost addition 20% from Droplet price.

Then under “Choose a data-center region” select the location of data-center you are willing to have your droplet. It is advice to select a data-center closer to your country/region. In this tutorial, I am choosing Singapore Data-center.

Then you can select the number of droplets you need according to previously decide configurations. In this occasion, I just need a single droplet.

Then you have to setup your server hostname. If you are willing to use a domain to access your droplet, then it is advice to use a valid FQDN (fully qualified domain) as your server hostname. That is; if your domain is mydomain.com, you have to use something like server.mydomain.com as the hostname.

Here I have used panel.serverself.com as my hostname.

Finally, “Create” your new droplet

Wait till new droplet is initialize.

After droplet is initialized, go to your email which is used for your DigitalOcean account.

There you can see an email received from support@support.digitalocean.com with some information regarding your newly created droplet.

Step 2: Connect to the Droplet

Having those information with you, open the putty program that you have installed on your machine. You’ll obtain an interface as below.

Copy your server IP address from email and paste it in the text box asking for Host Name (or IP address). Click on “Open” button to make the connection to your droplet.

Note: If you are using a Linux machine, you can type following command in Linux terminal to connect to your droplet; and press Enter.

ssh GIVE_YOUR_IP_ADDRESS_HERE

Then you’ll be asked to Add server’s host key to the PuTTY cache. Press “Yes”.

After that you’ll be ask for the username (login as:). Type “root” (without quotations) and press enter.

Then you’ll be asked for the root password. Go to your email and copy the password sent by DigitalOcean (a String with 20+ characters)

Go to putty window and paste it there.

IMPORTANT:

In order to paste text to putty terminal, just left click inside the terminal (black) area. Give two-finger tap in the case of using a touch-pad.
The password won’t visible once its’ pasted. So don’t make several left clicks or two-finger taps to make it confirm. This will cause to repeatedly paste your password.

Now press enter.

Then you’ll asked for the “(current) UNIX password”: Paste the already copied password again, and press enter.