Prerequisite
The first thing you need before you continue to follow the tutorial is to register for Digital Ocean. If you have not done that, I suggest you to follow the link and signup.
Setting your first server
Digital Ocean calls their virtual private servers as droplets. They have a wide range of droplets to choose from depending upon your need. For this tutorial, I will follow the cheapest droplet available. They can be horizontally scaled if you need more resources which basically means you can increase the resources of your server without re-creating or destroying the server first which can really come in handy if you want to upgrade.
After you have successfully signed up then go to the billing under accounts section and pay at least $5 dollars. If you signed up using the link right now, you should be able to claim $50 gift to try Digital Ocean for 2 months for free. Then follow these simple steps.
That’s it. After you press create button, your server instance will be created and the IP and username and password will be sent to you by email. You can SSH(Secure Shell Access) into your newly created Server. For windows you can download a client called PuTTy. In PuTTy just enter your IP address that you got in email from digital Ocean and select Open.
A pop up console window will appear just enter your credentials and you will be asked to change the password on the first login.
Additional Info about PuTTy
PuTTy has an old school interface and digital ocean has a long by default password and typing it one character a time is difficult. You cannot copy and paste into PuTTy console like traditionally you would with CTRL+C to copy and CTRL+V to paste.
In PuTTy, if you want to paste something like a long password you can copy the password the regular way e.g with CTRL+C and to paste it into PuTTy with Right Click of your mouse anywhere in the console and the text will be pasted at the location of the cursor. Right click also work for copying a selected text but it will automatically get pasted at the location of the cursor as well. You may use CTRL+C to copy the selected text but remember that CTRL+C in linux command line is used to stop a process so make sure you are not trying to copy with CTRL+C with something going on in the console.