Hi @coolinmc6

You're definitely on the right track! After setting up the DNS records so that your domain points to your Droplet's IP address, and securing the Droplet (initial server setup), all you need to do is install a webserver and upload the files that it should serve.

The most popular webservers are Apache and Nginx. Nginx performs much better than Apache at serving static files, so I would recommend going with that. Take a look at this tutorial:

• How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Once you've followed it and installed Nginx, you'll want to configure it to use a new path for the files. While you can use almost any path you want, I personally prefer /srv/www. Create that directory, and another directory in it for your domain name in order to make it easier to add other websites with different domain names in the future:

sudo mkdir /srv/www /srv/www/colinmc.me

Then, configure nginx to serve files from that directory. Open /etc/nginx/sites-available/default in your favorite text editor and update the line with the root directive such that it looks as follows:

    root /srv/www/colinmc.me;

Restart nginx in order for the changes to take effect:

sudo service nginx restart

Finally, change the directory ownership to your own user so that you can write to it:

sudo chown -R user:user /srv/www

And you're done! You can now upload your website's files using FileZilla to /srv/www/colinmc.me, which you should then see at colinmc.me.

Just thought I would note, remember to allow access to port 80 as explained in the Additional Recommended Settings guide if you had previously set up a firewall.

I was working on an old droplet and kept receiving 504 errors. It took me hours to figure out that was the issue.