I am learning pen testing and ethical hacking as a hobby. When doing pentesting, it's common to setup a local Virtual Machine (VM) using Virtual Box to setup the attack boxes. However, one issue I face regurlary is how slow each of the tool installation and scaning takes. Since local VMs rely on my internet speed, often it takes a lot of waiting time for scanning outside servers.
Then I realized I can use a VM from a VPS provider such as Digital Ocean and use it for external pentesting. By doing so, I can use a faster CPU, RAM, and of course, fast internet speeds. Working with a commercial VM will help you speed up your processes when connecting to public servers like HackTheBox or PentesterLab.
In this article, I will walk you through setting up a pen-testing attacker machine with Digital Ocean.