How to Sign Up for, Buy, and Manage a DigitalOcean VPS

Here is a summary of the registration, purchase, and management steps for a digitalocean VPS:

1. Register an account;
2. Verify your email;
3. Verify your payment method;
4. Create a VPS server.
5. VPS server management
6. Introduction to the settings interface

Register an Account

Click this referral link to register and get a $10 discount!

Email Verification

After registering successfully, a verification email will be sent to your registered email address. Open your inbox and click the verification link to verify your account.

Payment Method Verification

After your email is verified successfully, you will be automatically logged in to the “Billing” page in the digitalocean settings to verify your payment method. There are two verification methods: one is to link a credit card, and the other is to top up your account with $5 through paypal. Personally, I recommend not linking a credit card and instead paying through PayPal. The advantage of verifying your account by topping up through paypal is that if there is a dispute, you can apply for a refund through a paypal dispute, and paypal funds are more secure than linking a credit card. The specific process for linking a credit card is shown below:

The PayPal payment procedure is shown below:

If you have a promo code, you can enter it.

After the payment is completed, go to the billing page and check your balance!

Alright, now you can create a host! Click create Droplet in the upper-right corner to create one.

Now you are on the creation page. Step 1: choose a host image. I have always used Debian 7 64-bit.

Step 2: choose a plan. Select a different plan according to your needs. If you only want to use it to bypass internet restrictions, the $5 plan is enough!

Step 3: choose a data center, which means selecting the server location. The blogger has tried these data centers one by one, and personally thinks several North American locations all have decent speeds. For China Telecom users in mainland China, it is recommended to choose San Francisco on the U.S. West Coast!

You can skip the optional settings and adding an ssh key; personally, I don’t think they are very useful!

Step 4: fill in the hostname and the number of hosts with the same configuration you want to deploy, then click create to finish creating them.

Okay, the host has been created. Click the newly created host to enter the control panel!

If the host is not powered on, click the button on the right to start it!

There is a row of buttons on the left side of the control panel.

The first one is the chart, which shows detailed CPU, network traffic, and disk usage information!

Here you can log in to the console via SSH for management, or reset the root superuser password.

Here you can shut down the VPS or restart it. Of course, even if it is powered off, billing will continue. Only deleting the VPS host will stop billing. For the delete function, please see Destroy [Delete].

Network information

Backup data. The system will automatically back up your host data every week, but it is a paid service!

Snapshot!

Change the system kernel.

Delete the host. Shutting it down will still continue to charge you; only deleting the host will stop further charges!

I won’t go over the others!

After creating the host, let’s download putty to remotely control it. You can actually use DigitalOcean’s console too, but it’s very cumbersome!

Download putty

As for DigitalOcean, it sends the password to your email, and when you first log in to the VPS, the system will prompt you to change it. Just enter the original password once more, then enter the new password twice in a row and that’s it. DigitalOcean’s default SSH port is 22, and the username is root.