Been lurking around this topic mining HOdl for a couple days and thought I'd put together a little could mining tutorial for anyone who's interested.
I can't promise any coins as I haven't managed to find any blocks on my 3 seperate 2cpu clouds running for 2 days straight at 30h/s each LOL...but if you feel like spending money you can upgrade to something a little faster.

I've been using www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=f880234fe461 (referral link will get you $10 free credit, but you have to spend $5 to activate account regardless)

The 2cpu option is $.03/hour so with the $10 credit and $5 activation you can mine for 500 hours.

Once activated, click the green "create droplet" in the upper right corner of the page.

Use Ubuntu as OS (Debian will work but requires more work to get bitcoin repository)

Select cloud Specs(2 CPU is the only one available by default and anything better requires a deposit. $10 extra got me access to the 4g ram 2cpu which was useless and I'm not sure what it takes to get the better ones.)

All other variables are optional but if you are a beginner just leave it default and create the droplet.

Once it's done, click "more" next to your droplet and chose "access console" from the drop-down list.

Now type "root" and hit enter.  It will prompt you for a password which was emailed to you upon creation of the droplet. (You will need to enter it twice and change it to something else.)

Once you are logged into root you can get started.  Enter these commands one at a time, hitting enter after each and allow the process to finish completely before entering the next.  Many of them will require that you select Y for yes or N for no.  Always chose y then hit enter.
From here you will create your configuration file.  I recommend the following
Note that quotation marks are necessary around the wallet address that you wish to mine to.

Once complete, ctrl+o to write, then ctrl+x to exit nano

Now to start the miner and view its progress, enter the following commands
To exit the status of debug.log you can use ctrl+c

To stop the miner once out of debug.log use,
Once started you can leave the webpage and it will continue mining.  

If anyone finds typos, incorrect information, or has any critique let me know and i will correct the post.

Feel free to ask any questions and I will help as much as possible!

I just git cloned the github and after compiling the source I'm getting this error on hodlcoind:

"errors" : "This is a pre-release test build - use at your own risk - do not use for mining or merchant applications"

and it shows this version number: "version" : 1000099

and just yesterday I did the same on another box with a version number 110200, without any error message.

What am I doing wrong?

Spam. This was covered by user samsmith weeks ago, and you've just cut & pasted his guide.

If you use services that require a reference code as part of your duty to get new customers, you've gone commercial. I'm pretty sure that posting such advertising to a thread not specified for such use would (or should) be against the policy of this forum.

Not spamming, I only posted the reference code because you get $10 if you use it, If someone wants to use a different cloud service to mine or sign up and not get free credit then good on them, but I spent a lot of time figuring out how to get it up and running and wanted to put together a start to finish guide for anyone that doesn't want to have to piece together posts from all throughout this thread and maybe doesn't even know where to start and part of that is figuring out where you can actually cloud mine. I looked at a lot of sites and read through terms and agreements and a lot of cloud servers only allow 100% cpu usage for brief intervals and will ban you for mining 24/7 so I thought I'd share which service I ended up using.  I have no duty to get new customers and only get free credit if a referral spends $25 which I wouldn't and didn't recommend as you can get 500 hours of mining for $5.  I appreciate looking out for spammers because I hate that shit in these forums too and I almost didn't use the the ref code for that exact reason, but it seems that the benefit for anyone that uses it far outweighs the possibility of me being misunderstood as a spammer.

Misleading information. DigitalOcean policy is "Send your friends $10 in DO credit and earn $25 for each one that signs up" not "earn $25 for each one that spends X dollars." I'm quite familiar with their terms and their referral program. There are far better cloud sites with much more free credit, and which do not contain any viral marketing that causes users to spam the internet.

I'd also like to point out that in many forums, excessive message quoting is regarded as a form of spam.  Fine line you're walking here, but since the moderator hasn't jumped in looks like you got away with it.

I do appreciate that you seem earnest in your reply, but sometimes it's hard to know when you're being sucked in.