Getting a server

Introduction

Servers: You need one. Here’s how to get it.

How to get one

Create your account

We will use DigitalOcean for this tutorial, but the steps are largely the same for other providers.

Note: DigitalOcean provides a virtual server, which is different from owning a physical server. If you wish to own the underlying hardware, look into “data center colocation”, which is outside the scope of this article.

Create a project

  1. Go to Project > New Project.

  2. Fill out the information on the form. You do not need to provide environment type or purpose. Create Project page

You do not need to assign resources to it for now. If you already have a virtual server set up on the account, you can move it over now.

If you make a mistake, you can delete this project from its Settings menu.

Create a Droplet

  1. From the left-hand toolbar, select Manage > Droplets

  2. Click “Create Droplet”

  3. Choose a region for your droplet. This should be the city closest to whoever will be using the server, which is probably you. The exact datacenter does not matter, this setting is for large deployments.

  4. Choose an operating system. This should be the most recent version of Ubuntu labeled “LTS” (Long Term Support).

  5. Choose a droplet size. You do not need beyond a regular CPU for any of these tutorials. What you need will vary according to your needs. You may need to scroll to see the cheapest option.

A Wordpress blog, or anything “heavy”, should start with at least 1GB of memory.

An XMPP server is very light, and uses about 32MB of RAM.

  1. Add additional storage if you think you will need more than the provided amount of disk space on your server.

Storage on a Volume behaves exactly like a hard drive, and is ~$1 for 10GB.

If you need bulk storage for heavyweight files, you can look into some things called “block storage” and “object storage”. Using these technologies is a bit more work, but $1 will buy approximately 100GB.

  1. Turn on backups if you’d like to keep around an automatic periodic snapshot of your machine for restoration. ~$1/month.

  2. Select “SSH Key” as your login method. It will ask you for a public SSH key, which you can generate locally on your personal computer; there should be instructions provided on the page. If you would like a more detailed breakdown, check out our using SSH page.

It is possible to use password-based authentication, but you will probably need to do this setup at some point anyway. Doing it now gives you something much more secure than password-based authentication.

  1. Add metrics and IPv6 networking support. The metrics are useful, and using IPv6 helps make it easier for everyone to get ordinary IP addresses.

  1. Finalize the details. Make sure you’re only creating one droplet, give it a descriptive name, add tags as needed, add it to the project, and hit create.

  1. If you have a domain name that you will be using with this host, click on your droplet and hit the “Enable Now” button for a reserved IP. You want an IPv4 address, assigned to the droplet.

And that’s it! You now have a fully configured virtual server!