(Optional) Using Cloud Hosting

While you're free to host your reporter on your own, cloud hosting makes it easy to have 24/7 uptime.

Step 1: Sign up for Digital Ocean

The easiest and most reliable way to run your reporter is to use a service like Digital Ocean to host your reporters for you.

Digital Ocean is an incredibly affordable and user friendly-option, and new users may be eligible for a 2-month free trial.

Plans start as low as $4 USD per month, which is enough to allow you to run multiple Fetch reporters.

While we’ve kept things simple by using Digital Ocean for this guide, you can use whichever solution or self-hosted option you choose.

Step 2: Create Your Droplet

On Digital Ocean, we can set up a virtual machine known as a “Droplet”. This is essentially a remote device that will run the Telliot code for your reporter.

1. On the dashboard, select ‘deploy a virtual machine’ to set up our Droplet.

1. Now, select the region that’s closest to you in order to maximize your connection speed. Leave the datacenter option as default.

1. Make sure to select either Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS) or 24.04. (LTS) for the installation.

1. Choose your Droplet size

Running a reporter isn’t very intensive. At the lowest tier (which is currently the $4 USD per month, regular VM plan) you can run 4 reporters at the same time without any issues.

Feel free to select the best option according to the amount of reporters you’d like to run.

Here we’re selecting the $7 per month Premium AMD CPU option.

1. Set Your Password

Select the ‘password’ option and create a unique, strong password according to the requirements. This is the password you are going to use to access your Droplet from other devices.

Make sure to store your password, preferably offline, somewhere safe. You will not receive any emails containing the Droplet's details or password!

1. Now, it's just a matter of renaming your Hostname (optional) and double checking you are creating only one droplet (under ‘Quantity’).

After you’re done with your final checks, click Create Droplet and wait for it to be created.