In this video I walk you through setting up WordPress on a DigitalOcean droplet from scratch, and I keep it tight—three parts: creating the droplet, installing CloudPanel to manage it, then installing WordPress in just a couple of clicks. I’m using DigitalOcean here mainly because the 60‑day free trial is one of the longest I’ve seen, and it’s a really cost-effective way to test whether cloud VM hosting is actually a good fit for your WordPress sites. I also show the exact Ubuntu version I used (24.04 LTS) because CloudPanel support matters. Once the server is up, I show my preferred SSH-key setup (especially if you’re on Windows—PuTTY + PuTTYgen is still my favorite), run the update commands, and install CloudPanel with MariaDB (I generally like it for WordPress performance). Then we wire up a real domain with Cloudflare DNS, add the A/CNAME records, and set up SSL properly—including Cloudflare Origin Certificates and making sure Cloudflare is set to Full (strict), so you don’t get weird SSL issues. Finally, I go through practical security and speed wins: restricting traffic to Cloudflare only, enabling Varnish in CloudPanel, and the WordPress-side plugin to control it. I also share optional extras I use a lot—Cloudflare Super Page Cache, image compression, and basic optimization/security plugins—plus the big one: keep backups and keep everything updated.