How To Upgrade your Droplet in Digital Ocean

My general experience with digital ocean has not been that good but there a few things that makes me still rank them as one of the top VPS providers we have out there. The biggest challenge that most DO users face is the poor support - which the company says that its not obligated to offer since their product is "server space." and not a regular hosting.

You can think of it a s a house rent versus renting a piece of land. The house landlord might do some repairs on your house and offer other services but when you rent a piece of land you can put whatever you want and there is no extra service, you can stay and use the land as long as you continue paying for the space.

Digital ocean offers a $5 monthly plans that you can start out with but as your website grows, you might wanna move up the ladder to accommodate more people.

Upgrading your droplet will not affect you r site in terms of down, in fact your users wont even notice anything during the upgrade as it is done in a matter of minutes.

Another huge advantage with digital ocean is that you can either make your upgrade permanent or temporary depending on your needs.

I would suggest doing it during the time of day when your traffic is the lowest, here is how to do it.

• Power off your droplet

Resizing via Control Panel

Assuming you are already logged into your DigitalOcean Control Panel, go to the Droplets page and click on the name of the droplet you want to resize.


Click on the  Resize option which should be located on the left navigation section:

Click on poweroff to shut down your server (Digital ocean prefers that you use the sudo poweroff command but you can as well click on power button)

Choose your plan, then power on the droplet and you are done.


Resizing via API

curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'Authorization: Bearer b7d03a6947b217efb6f3ec3bd3504582' -d '{"type":"resize","size":"4gb"}' "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets/droplet_id/actions"

to make the resize permanent, set the diskattribute to true

curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'Authorization: Bearer b7d03a6947b217efb6f3ec3bd3504582' -d '{"type":"resize","size":"4gb","disk":true}' "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets/droplet_id/actions"