As mentioned previously, Digital Ocean increased the amount of RAM and Hard Disk space available on their existing VPS plans. Digital Ocean is now competitive with Linode and other major VPS providers again.
While their new VPS offerings are great, it is important to realize that existing VPS droplets do NOT get automatically upgraded. You have to actually log in to Digital Ocean’s website and manually upgrade your droplet, even if you are upgrading to a plan that has the same price as what you are paying now.
Again, if you have a $10 VPS with 1G of RAM, you will need to log in to Digital Ocean and manually upgrade to the $10, 2G RAM option.
How To Upgrade Your Droplet
Upgrading your droplet is easy. First, log in to the main Digital Ocean website.
It’s been a while since I logged in, so I got asked to verify my identity by receiving a code to the email address I have on file.
After logging in you should see a list of your Digital Ocean droplets. This tell you how large each droplet is and where it is located. As you can see, I have a 512MB dropplet in NYC2. That’s what I am looking to upgrade.
This droplet is on the $5/month plan, and now I can get 1G of RAM for the same price.
Click on the “more” menu on the right and select “Resize Droplet”.
This brings you to a window where you can select what to upgrade to. In my case I am upgrading to 1GB RAM for $5/month. Again, this is the same price, but more RAM.
I don’t need to upgrade my disk size, so I select CPU and RAM only. Be sure to backup your data before going any further!
As you can see, the one thing I need to do before I can upgrade my droplet is to turn it off. Digital Ocean cannot add more RAM or CPU unless the droplet is off.
While you can turn it off from this window, it is not recommended. Turning off your droplet from the Digital Ocean site can lead to loss of data and data corruption. It is much better to log in to your droplet and turn it off that way.
To turn off your droplet, you need to SSH into the droplet. Once you are in the command line, you need to run this command:
sudo shutdown -h now
This will turn off your machine. In a minute or so you will see that the Digital Ocean page now shows that your droplet is “off”. This is the safe way to turn off your VPS.
Ok, once you see that Digital Ocean shows your droplet as “off” you can click on the “resize” button on the bottom of the screen. It took about 2 minutes for my droplet to resize from 512MB to 1GB of RAM. You will see the status of the resize at the top of the page.
Once the resize is complete, just lick on the “off” button next to your droplet information to turn the droplet back on.
That’s it. You should now see that your droplet has more RAM and once the droplet is turned back on you should be able to use it like before. Try logging in to the droplet using SSH as soon as it is back up to make sure everything is up and running as expected.
The three important things to know are:
- You must turn off your droplet to resize. Turn it off using SSH.
- It take a few minutes (about 2 for me) to resize the droplet.
- Back up your data and remember to turn the droplet back on when done resizing.
- You must resize your droplet to get the new increased amount of RAM that Digital Ocean offers.
