Upgrades
VPSs can be upgraded at any time using the customer control panel. Once upgraded, you will need to take the additional steps described on this page in order to apply the upgrade.
From time to time, we upgrade all the servers in our range. We will notify you by email when this happens, and you should follow these steps to complete your VPS ugrade.
Applying upgrades
In order to apply upgrades to your VPS, you must shutdown and restart your
server. Please note that a complete shutdown is required; a reboot is not
sufficient. The best way to do this is from within your operating system (e.g.
shutdown -h now on Linux).
Once shut down, you can restart the server using the Start button in the control panel.
Resizing your disk
Danger
Making storage changes like resizing your partitions and filesystem carries a high risk, and any mistakes may be catastrophic. You should ensure you have known-good backups before performing a resize.
You can upgrade the disk of your server while it's running if your server
uses the default virtio disk bus.
To perform an online resize, use the Apply disk upgrade option while your server is running.
You will still need to resize the filesystem on your VPS. If you installed
your server using our automated installer, you can use cloud-init to
automatically resize the disk, by running the following command:
cloud-init single --name growpart && cloud-init single --name resizefs
This will resize your root partition and grow the filesystem. If you would prefer, you can also restart your server and cloud-init should automatically resize the filesystem on boot.
Please note that not all operating systems may support live resizing. If your
VPS uses the SCSI disk bus, you may need to force a rescan of the disks from
your operating system. If your VPS does not see the larger disk after
performing the live resize, you can perform an offline resize instead by
simply shutting down your server and then starting it again.
If you installed your operating system through another method, e.g. from a virtual CDROM, you will need to manually repartition the disk and resize your filesystem.
Offline resize
You can alternatively perform an offline resize by shutting down your server, then using the Apply disk upgrade option, then starting it again.
If you installed your server using our automated installer, your server's file system should be automatically resized on boot to make use of all available space.
Manually resizing the filesystem
If you installed the operating system on your virtual server through another method, e.g. from a virtual CDROM, you will need to manually re-partition your virtual server's disk and then resize its filesystem in order to take advantage of the additional space.
If you have our managed server option, then we are more than happy to repartition for you: please email to discuss your requirements.
If you have an unmanaged server, we can provide advice by email in the usual way, or perform the repartitioning for you as chargeable consultancy work.
If your server has a simple disk layout, e.g. with a single large partition
for your root filesystem, you may find it easiest to use parted's
resizepart command to automatically resize it. After resizing the
partition, you will need to resize the filesystem, e.g. using resize2fs.
If your server uses LVM, you will need to resize each layer in turn — e.g. first growing the underlying partition, then the LVM PV, then the LVM LV and then the filesystem.
In most cases this can be done while the server is running, but you may prefer to boot into a recovery environment to perform the changes.