My Virtual Private Server

I bought a server

As a professional computer programmer I have written and deployed a lot of code. Almost all of this code has run on machines that someone else had set up for me. This is a gap of knowledge and understanding and experience that I want to shrink.

This weekend, I made a step towards reducing my knowledge gap by purchasing access to a VPS (virtual private server) from Digital Ocean. With it, I can now start up a linux server "in the cloud" in a couple of minutes. I didn't and don't fully understand what that meant (because of my previously noted knowledge gap), but I signed up for an account and bought some credits anyway.

What did I buy?

I bought something that Digital Ocean calls 'droplets'. Droplets are a virtual server that has an operating system, like Ubuntu, and a set of resources like a hard drive, RAM, bandwidth and an IP address. You can then connect to your droplet via ssh and do whatever unix stuff you like.

I bought the cheapest one which is an Ubuntu server with 512 MB of RAM, 20 GB hard disk and 1000 GB of transfer. It costs $5/month or .007 cents per hour. I used a coupon code, for $10, so I won't start paying for a little while.

For now, I'm still in the process of configuring it. Until I have something like a web server running on it, I have been shutting down the server whenever I am not actively working on it. I think this will save me some cents.

Oh yeah, like I said, I'm a dummy - so without understanding things, I also bought a domain name from google domains. It's jjjdddfff.com. I'm still learning how the server works, so getting a domain name is a bit premature, and money not well spent. Oh well, I guess it'll be motivation to get something working sooner than later.

What have I done so far

So far, I've followed some of digital ocean's tutorials and done the basics. I used ssh to connect to my virtual server from my home machine. I added a non root unix user that has sudo privileges. I added some firewalls.

Next, I plan on installing components for a web stack. And after that, who knows?