Self-provision a custom server

Rent a VM or physical server at the provider of your choice. It really doesn’t matter who you use.
Initialize the server with a plain vanilla install of Ubuntu 18.04 (or 18.04.1 if they provide it), the release code-named “Bionic Beaver”.
If you provide an SSH key, you won’t really need the root password, which is OK because it’s going to be changed during the Gridpane setup process anyway.
Take note of the IP address and Datacenter in the customer’s “info” file.
In Gridpane, go the the Server tab and in the Provision A Server box choose “Custom VPS”.
In the section that opens up, enter the customer# (for example, C00101) followed by “-n”, where “n” is the server number in case they have multiple servers. You’ll end up with a server name something like C00101-1.
In the Datacenter, enter the server provider and datacenter city, for example, “Vultr Chicago”.
The web server and database should be set to Nginx and Percona by default, use those settings.
Click “Create Server”. A popup window will immediately appear. Take note of the root password in the customer’s “info” file, triple-click to select the server initialization command (starts with something like “wget -O gridpane-me.sh…”) and copy it to the clipboard.
SSH into the server as root, paste the command, end press Enter to execute. This will run for about 5 minutes.
When the command finishes executing on the terminal, it will automatically begin executing the second phase of the build. You can monitor its progress in the Gridpane server tab. This phase takes about 15-20 minutes. The progress bar doesn’t move reliably, so refresh the page from time to time to monitor its progress.