How to get started using more secure SSH keys as part of your DigitalOcean server maintenance. Using an SSH key pair will protect you from brute force attempts, if you look in your auth logs you will see hackers are always attempting to break into your servers!
If your Droplet has an extremely active database its worth exporting the data into a static file just before taking a snapshot, this was you guarantee your data is safely backed up and restorable without corruption. For this guide, we are going to base it on using MySQL but this is possible for any database where you can export into a static file.