Droplet slow and inaccessible

I have a droplet with Discourse on it. Yesterday I rebooted it (Ubuntu had the usual nag about rebooting). Now everything is super slow and I can neither ssh in or even get the Digital Ocean console to connect. I’ve been running this droplet for 5y (Ubuntu 16.04), don’t have backups on (always thought those were automatic like my other provider has it).

Accessing the discourse forum is still possible so the server is running: forum.jobscoop.fi (temporary username ktoguest, no password needed)

But no changes are possible.

I’m guessing Ubuntu updated something, started writing a massive log and filled up the disk space?

Since I cannot ssh or get console access it’s kinda hard to fix whatever the issue is.

I’m not very good with Linux anymore (haven’t used it much in the past 10 years anymore).

What action can/should I take?

1. Hard reboot and hope I can get in long enough to figure things out. But if there is 0 disk space I might just end up in the same situation.

2. Increase the droplet size. But if something is filling up the disk I might have a very small window to fix things. Obviously I don’t want to resize several times as I would then have to backup and create a new droplet to downsize not to pay through my nose.

3. Enable backups so I can get back to this state if 2) fills up the disk.

4. Get hands on help from Digital Ocean? How?

Problem is, with limited Linux knowledge, I’m not sure I can fix anything “fast”.