Resizing A Droplet The Correct Way

November 10, 2015 5.7k views
Scaling DigitalOcean Ubuntu
mosaic
By:
mosaic

Hi,

One of my sites seems to be struggling with resources so i am thinking of Resizing the droplet from the $10 per month to the $20 per month plan.

I am surprised that i cannot find details on 'How To Resize Your Droplet'... can anyone help with steps for this (Ubunto / Wordpress).

Thanks in advance for your help.

1 comment
  • j5453e04c436018 November 12, 2015

    See the following tutorial:

    How To Resize Your Droplets on DigitalOcean

    How To Resize Your Droplets on DigitalOcean
    by Melissa Anderson
    Resizing your servers can be an effective way of increasing their capacity, by allowing them to utilize more memory (RAM), CPU, and disk storage. The ability to resize a server, also known as vertical scaling, can be useful in a variety of situations that prompt the need for a more powerful server, such as if your concurrent user base increases or if you need to store more data. In this tutorial, we will show you how to resize your server, also known as a droplet, on DigitalOcean.
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1 Answer
jtittle1 November 11, 2015

@mosaic - To resize a Droplet, you must first power it off. DigitalOcean, as of right now, does not offer a way to resize without powering down. While you can power down from DigitalOcean's CP, ideally, it should be done from the CLI using the poweroff or shutdown -h now commands. Once the Droplet is offline, you can proceed to resize. The time it takes to resize varies and is not absolute, so it's best to do this at a time when traffic is low.

The alternative is to create a snapshot (which also requires you to power down) of your current Droplet and then restore that snapshot to a larger Droplet of your choosing. In most cases, this is quicker and you'd follow the same process to shutdown the Droplet as you would if you were to choose to resize.

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  • mosaic November 11, 2015

    Thank you. It is much appreciated.

  • ogbongefriends1 January 30, 2016

    Please two questions. Would you need to destroy the first droplet you did a snapshot before you restore that snapshot to the new larger droplet. secondly, if you used the alternative of creating a new larger droplet, will you not lose the IP of the old droplet?

    • jtittle1 June 8, 2016

      @ogbongefriends1 - I apologize for the delay in response! Kids, College and work have kept me loaded since the start of the year :).

      If you take a snapshot and restore to a new Droplet, you will effectively lose the IP that is associated with the current, yes. There is one way around this though and that's with the newly added Floating IP's (under Networking).

      You can assign a floating IP to the current Droplet and then modify any instances of the primary Droplet IP to use the Floating IP. Once this is done, shutdown, take a snapshot and then restore that snapshot to a new Droplet. Once the snapshot is restored, simply reassign the floating IP to the new Droplet and make the appropriate changes to your DNS (i.e. changing instances of the primarily Droplet IP to use the new Floating IP).

      That'd be the best way to go about it if downtime and the IP are a concern.

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