I found this article and wonder if anyone has achieved this on DigitalOcean and had more specific details on how it was performed.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-scale-your-infrastructure-with-digitalocean
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The resources of a droplet are set at boot time. When you resize everything is setup for the droplet to take advantage of additional resources, however, without a reboot - there is no way for the virtual server to reset it’s configuration.