How do you "move" a droplet that acts as a mail server?

March 3, 2018 873 views
Apache Email DNS Ubuntu 16.04
patrickhollingd
By:
patrickhollingd

Hi there,

Currently I have one large droplet that serves several domains and also acts as a mail server. I want to take advantage of the new DI pricing and run several droplets instead of the one large one. (Basically I want one mail droplet and two “site” droplets, one live and one for testing.)

My only worry in doing this is that my current large droplet also acts as a mail server. What I’m worried about is if I do the following…

  1. Take an image of existing large droplet, let’s call it droplet.info
  2. From the above image, create newdroplet.info,
  3. Destroy droplet.info.
  4. Rename newdroplet.info to droplet.info

…will this lose the current reverse DNS lookup or will it stay the same? (DI assigns this based on the droplet name.)

If I will lose the existing reverse DNS, does that mean I also lose the credibility/reputation my mail server currently has built up? It took ages to get it working and so I’m a bit scared to do the above.

Cheers,
Pat

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2 Answers
moisey MOD March 14, 2018

Hi Pat,

If you snapshotted the droplet and created a new one it would receive a new IP so outside of reverse DNS you would be on a new IP which means the reputation you built on the original droplet wouldn’t be there.

There are a couple of fixes.

One is you could move the other services off of this droplet to other droplets, though as you mentioned this one is the larger one you have so moving services off and just running email maybe overkill and not give you a cost savings.

The second thing is you may want to consider using floating IPs, that route back to your droplet, the floating IP is yours and be assigned to different droplets, but then you would have to build up your reputation all over again.

If you wanted to snapshot and re-create the droplet on the same IP, which would be ideal, reach out to support to see if that’s possible.

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patrickhollingd September 13, 2018

Hi there @moisey,

Sorry for my incredibly slow reply. I always respond to answers so can’t remember what happened here. Think I may have fallen off a ladder about that time. Oops!

Anyway, today I contacted support and within a few minutes they replied and explained that I could change my current droplet to the new lower priced plan by simply powering it down and resizing it. Have just done that and so can now get some new droplets and begin building the new set-up without the fear of breaking anything :)

Thanks so much for your answer above and the suggestion of the floating IP. That suggestion will make a massive difference.

Thanks again,
Pat

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