Digital Ocean droplet

Digital ocean droplet

Digital Ocean offers a virtual machine hosting service called Droplets. Droplets are very low cost ($5/month), low performance VMs which can be used for hosting a website, webservice, database or running cron jobs.

Setup

Droplets can be started from scratch, where you get an empty machine, or from an app on the Digital Ocean Marketplace. The easiest way to get started quickly is to create a Droplet with Docker pre-installed.

It is a very easy process to setup a Droplet using Docker:

1. Create the VM on digitalocean.com
2. Add IP address to ./ssh/config on local work station.
3. Connect to the VM via SSH with ssh hostname
4. Use SFPT to transfer a project's files to the image, or pull from Git.
5. Run docker-compose up

Firewalls

If you start with a Docker Droplet from the Marketplace, the firewall is preconfigured to only allow SSH (22), Docker (2375,2376) and HTTP (80). It is possible to open up port 443 using a command line tool.

AMD vs Intel

The premium AMD droplets seem to have the best disk performance.