Once you have signed up with Digital Ocean then go ahead and log in. You will be presented with a page like this.
Do not panic, Your card will not be charged and it does not matter even if you bank ballance is zero. This is only stored on Digital Ocean for when you finished the $10 credit.
Next in the page speed SEO tutorial, you will create your first droplet on Digital Ocean. A droplet is space on a gigantic server. The benefits of using a droplet are that you can upgrade or downgrade ram and drive space without resetting your server.
When you see this page click the button “Create Droplet”
Next, you will choose your server operating system, For page speed SEO Choose Ubuntu 16.04, This is required to follow this complete tutorial.
Now you need to choose which server to use, Remember if you used the signup link from this tutorial you will be entitled to $10 free credit. Me personally I use a $5 a month droplet and its works perfectly with the exact settings I show in this tutorial.
So for the sake of this Page speed for SEO tutorial, we will use the $5 a month server.
If you choose the $5 a month server and you used the signup link from this page speed article then you will not be billed for 2 months. After 2 months you will need to top-up your digital ocean credit account.
Now you need to decide the location of your new server, I choose New York as I feel it is closer to my audience but really this does not matter due to the fact that we will be using Cloudflare CDN. So if you are like me then choose New York, but it’s totally up to you.
To achieve 100% in Gmetrix I use some proxy passes for external javascript files in Nginx such as Google Analytics, to do this you need to have ipv6 on your domain so make sure to tick ipv6
The next step is to name your server, for ease I changed this to hobbydabber as this is the domain name and makes it easy for me to keep track of. You can change this to whatever you want alternatively you can keep it as it is.
Click the Create button then your server will be created, The next step is to go check your email for server login details
From the email copy the ip address and then open PuTTy, If you do not have PuTTy then you can get it from here
Once you have PuTTy then open it and copy the ip address from the email and past it into Putty, as shown below. Then click open
After you click open the first thing you will see is a warning, just click “yes” and continue to PuTTy
The login username for ssh PuTTy is “root” so enter root into PuTTy as shown in the image below then press enter.
Now you will be asked for your password, go back to the email from Digital Ocean and copy the password. To paste into PuTTy just left click in Putty then right click on the mouse. This will paste the text you copied, Then hit Enter.
Please note, Passwords on PuTTy will not be displayed to you, this is for security but be sure if you right clicked on the mouse then the password will be pasted even if you do not see it.
Now as this is the first time logging into your new server via SSH you will be required to change your password. The first step is to give the current password again so just right click in PuTTy then hit enter.
Next you will be prompted to enter a new password, Use your keyboard and type your new password. Remember you will not see the password but just know that what you type will be imputed as your password.
You will now need to confirm your new password, Go ahead and type your new password again.
You have now completed the signup and setup of SSH access to your server. You should now see something like shown in the image below.
Thats concludes Step 1 of this page speed for white hat seo tutorial
