Creating Cloud Instances in Digital Ocean

4 min readMar 15, 2020

Ever wonder on how you can create you cloud instance in Digital Ocean securely? Here’s a simple ‘how to’ to get you started.

Create Droplets

First create your droplets (Digital Ocean’s lingo for VMs).

For this example, we will create our own Linux host using CentOS 8 as our operating system

Customize Droplets

Choose your plan

Pick your Region

Configure Networking

I chose Private Networking so if I ever needed to build additional hosts and I wanted to connect them (local area network), private networking will be your best choice without going through the hassle of VPNs and connecting hosts between regions.

Connectivity via SSH

Once you have build out your droplet specifications, the next part is establishing connection via Secure Shell (SSH). Digital Ocean’s platform let’s you configure your Linux connection via SSH using keys that gives you protection compare on using username and password account which leaves your host vulnerable to DoS and password cracking types of attacks.

Creating SSH Keys

Digital Ocean have great documentations that can assist you on creating your SSH key. Follow the links on ‘creating key’s and you will see the different instructions on how to do it based on your operating system.

Example below is how I created my SSH key on Windows system.

Once you have completed the process of creating your public key, you will notice that you can now use this key to build your Linux hosts.

Finalize your Build

Last step is to finalize your build by giving your droplet a name and or a tag.

Secure Connection

Before connecting, there are several settings that you need to be aware before accidentally exposing your instance in public.

Within your droplet, chose ‘Networking’ and scroll down until you see Firewall settings. I would highly recommend to only allow IPs that needs to connect to your instance and not anyone else in the Internet.