How to Host WordPress site on Digital Ocean VPS

Create your first Droplet

After you create your account and add some balance via paypal/credit card, you now can create a new “droplet” by clicking “Create” button from your control panel.

There’s going to be several option which is straight forward and easy to understand:

Droplet Hostname

You can input any text here, but if you have a domain you want to host you can add it there, you can rename them later. But It’s best to add it if you already have domain to host in your droplet.

Select Size

you can select server size, I use the lowest package ($5) but might need to upgrade later/create new one. I might need the $40 package to hosts my sites + client sites.

Select Region

You can select server data center, pick one nearest to your area/visitor area. For example, I live in Indonesia (south east asia), for my local client with Indonesia target visitor, Singapore server might be best, for this site New York or California region is better.

Select Image

There’s several tabs in this section. We’re going to skip “Linux Distributions” Tab because we’re going to install via “Applications” option.

In this Applications tab, were going to select “LAMP on Ubuntu”, so our server will be using Ubuntu OS with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) pre-installed. You can also use “WordPress on Ubuntu” option which will also install WordPress for you. I try to use this option on my first droplet, but i didn’t really like the setup, and of course because they misspelled “Wordpress”

Settings

In settings section I enable VirtIO and Backup. Even though we can create “server snapshot” we need to do it manually and it require to “poweroff” the server. Backup is similar to snapshot but it’s done automatically (Digital Ocean stated that it’s every several days depend on the size of the Droplet) and it’s done in the background, so we don’t need to turn off/poweroff our server.

That’s it, now we have a droplet to use.

After all done, you’ll get an email about your server account/root access to your server:

• IP Address: {your droplet IP address}
• Username: root
• Password: {your root password}