It's possible to run a custom (instead of hypervisor-managed) kernel for use with Debian 8.x on a DigitalOcean droplet.
We'll build one with grsecurity, "an extensive security enhancement to the Linux kernel that defends against a wide range of security threats through intelligent access control, memory corruption-based exploit prevention, and a host of other system hardening".
Note: The stable patches for Linux 3.14.x and 3.2.x are not publicly available anymore, so we'll be applying the free 4.2.x (test) patch. The URLs and filenames in this document may become outdated, so fetch the latest from grsecurity.net and kernel.org.
Install dependencies: