I followed the steps to prep the new droplet created in digital ocean and you hit the username@IP: Permission denied (publickey) ! I chose the 18.04 Ubuntu to be installed in my droplet, followed the steps in here to configure it . The issue came with not being able to login with the new user created. Solution: At this point , I am able to login to the droplet using ssh root user. I logged in and changed the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config . There is already an entry PasswordAuthentication no .