If you are anything like me, you want to break into cloud computing — but where do you start? Luckily, I'm here to provide some hopefully useful guidance.

How It Starts

You will need a VPS (Virtual Private Server). There are many great options out there: Hostinger, Vultr, Akamai (formerly Linode), DigitalOcean, and more. The catch? They all cost money.

Enter Oracle Cloud Free Tier — a solid free option to get started.

Creating an Oracle Account

Head to oracle.com/cloud and follow the sign-up steps. Note: You will be asked to enter your banking information even for the free tier — this is expected and you won't be charged as long as you stay within free-tier limits. A few important tips:

1. Remember your cloud name. This is easy to overlook and difficult to recover if forgotten.
2. When creating a VPS, change the instance shape to the free-tier Ampere (ARM64) option — there are three shapes to choose from.
3. Consider switching the instance image from Oracle Linux to Ubuntu or another Linux distro you're comfortable with.
4. Enable a public IP address — don't skip this.
5. Generate an SSH key on your local machine and paste the public key into the instance during setup. This will save you a lot of trouble when connecting later.

How to Generate SSH Keys for Oracle Cloud

Oracle Cloud only supports RSA-based SSH keys. Open your terminal and run the following command, replacing {your-email} with your email or a label of your choice, and {filename} with the absolute path where you want the key stored (e.g. ~/.ssh/id_rsa_oracle).

Generate an RSA SSH Key

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C {your-email} -f {filename}

Print Your Public Key

Run this to print the contents of your public key — you'll paste this into Oracle Cloud during instance setup.

cat ~/.ssh/{filename}.pub

Connecting to Your VPS

SSH into your instance using the -i flag to specify your identity file. When prompted about the host fingerprint, enter yes.

ssh -i ~/.ssh/{your-key-file} ubuntu@{ip-address}

To avoid typing this every time, add an entry to your SSH config:

mkdir -p ~/.ssh
touch ~/.ssh/config
nano ~/.ssh/config

Add the following block, replacing the placeholders with your values:

Host {short-name}
    HostName {ip-address}
    User ubuntu
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/{ssh-filename}

When Do I Install Dokploy?

Almost there — a few more steps first. Before installing anything, it's good practice to harden your instance against common attack vectors.

Hardening Your VPS

• Update and upgrade all packages
• Set up UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall)
• Set up fail2ban to block repeated failed login attempts

Install Dokploy

Now for the main event. Grab the install command from the Dokploy website, SSH into your VPS, switch to the root user, and run the script:

sudo su -