Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month

Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month August 23, 2026 My homepage now runs on OpenBSD with httpd(8) and Let's Encrypt via acme-client(1) . I previously hosted it on GitHub Pages and then eventually moved to Cloudflare Pages because both options were free and easy. Free and easy is cool, and I understand that writing software full-time leaves us wanting absolutely nothing to do with computers after we punch out, but lately I have been missing the do-it-yourself web that I grew up with. Some of my favorite times growing up included installing and configuring UNIX-based operating systems and spending hours trying to understand how computers worked. I even met one of my closest friends online through a FreeBSD UNIX shell account forum more than 20 years ago. So, in that vein, I wanted to write something on how you can get up and running on OpenBSD with DigitalOcean for $4 a month. Well, really, it's $4.24 after tax but that's still pretty good! Download OpenBSD There are a few different options when it comes to downloading OpenBSD , but the quickest method is to grab the miniroot image. curl -O -O https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.9/arm64/{miniroot79.img,SHA256} Confirm that the checksum of the image is correct. sha256sum -c --ignore-missing SHA256 miniroot79.img miniroot79.img: OK Sign Up for DigitalOcean and Upload miniroot79.img Once you are signed up and logged in to DigitalOcean, go to Backups & Snapshots under the STORAGE section in the left-hand navigation. Clic…