Question

Hardware configurations on 2 DO servers......

Hi,

I created and deployed my first Digital Ocean server just over a year ago when I created a wealth advisory site for millennials (https://wealth-hack.com). The site is powered in a fairly standard manner, Ubuntu 160.4, with Wordpress on top and a premium template making it look not home made. I didn’t have a huge amount of traffic but from time to time, would see ‘memory utilization is above 85%’ messages. The memory issues would tend to resolve themselves quickly so I didn’t spend too much time on that.

I created my second droplet a few months ago to start a second site, this time a sports betting advisory platform (https://betsharper.com). I put similar tech and it has been running absolutely seamlessly. I wondered why.

So when I checked back, I think the specs for a default droplet may have changed in the last year. My initial droplet (wealth-hack) comes with half a gig of memory, my newer droplet (betsharper) has 1 gig. Any advice on what I should do? Is there a way to move the old droplet to the new standard? Or should I diagnose the memory consumption on wealth-hack regardless? As things stand, the memory use on idle hovers just under 80% and apache 2 is consuming 113.41% (according to the ‘top processes’ monitoring widget within DO’s management GUI).

Thanks in advance, James.

Submit an answer

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!

Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in Q&A, subscribe to topics of interest, and get courses and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business.

jamesburns1977 • June 26, 2018

Couldn’t help it, I struck while the iron was hot and resized it. Utterly faultless and conducted literally within 2 mins! Very very impressed Team DigitalOcean. I continue to be a very happy customer (and tell my friends and coworkers the same)…

jamesburns1977 • June 26, 2018

A free upgrade to bring WealthHack up to the level of BetSharper! Great news @aha, many thanks for the share. My next backup is a few days away, I’ll get through this and then look to activate the resize option:)

I’ll take a look at performance post upgrade to see if I still have horsepower issues and if so, look to use your helpful optimization guide. Again, appreciate your advice @aha:)

Andy Hattemer • June 18, 2018

Hi James -

  • Did Droplet specs change in the last year? Yes! In January 2018 DigitalOcean released a major pricing update that at least doubled RAM on every Droplet size, and increased SSD storage on most, and even number of vCPUs on some plans.
  • Is there a way to move the old droplet to the new standard? Yes! Go to your old Droplet’s page in the control panel and click Resize. Resizing to the NEW $5 Droplet plan will double your RAM to 1GB and give you 5GB more SSD storage. NOTE: Resizing will require you to restart your Droplet, if you’ve never restarted it, you may need to login afterwards and confirm Wordpress/MySQL etc… are correctly set to auto-run on startup.
  • Should I diagnose the memory consumption on wealth-hack regardless? - Do you get the memory usage alerts around the same time of day? Often there is a daily log aggregation or backup process that momentarily surges memory usage, but isn’t otherwise a problem. If you are noticing that your site is generally slow, there are tons of other optimizations you can make, here’s a good place to start: https://serverpilot.io/community/articles/how-to-reduce-php-and-wordpress-memory-usage.html

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up