Question

Good Practise Maintaining VPS Droplet

Posted on June 11, 2021
DigitalOcean Droplets Ubuntu 16.04
Asked by Calvin Crane

I started my Ubuntu 16.04 along with very helpful tutorials and am reasonably comfortable with doing things with help and solutions online. I am feeling that Ubuntu has moved on and I wonder how upgrading it goes?

I am just running websites on the server which also need databases. I have setup all the users and everything so it’s pretty time consuming to do everything again (it doesn’t feel like an efficient way).

How long will I be able to keep updating Ubuntu 16.04?

Because I feel I would like to perhaps run more websites and increase the droplet size too.

I have read through this and nothing is putting me off. Though I may not have enough space to upgrade.

Can I upgrade and downgrade my memory of the droplet?

Ref:https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/upgrade-introduction

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• June 16, 2021

Accepted Answer

Hi there @landed,

I actually had a similar case with my own Ubuntu Droplet, I started with Ubuntu 18.04 and I’ve been upgrading it to the newer versions every year, I’m currently running Ubuntu 20.10.

You need to keep in mind that there will be some downtime during the upgrade and that some packages might get newer versions too, so you might have to do some adjustments to your website to get it to work with the newer services. So it is best to schedule some maintenance window and also take a snapshot of your server so that in case anything goes wrong, you would be able to revert back to a working version of your server.

Regarding the downsizing, this is often not a so easy task, there is some manual steps that you need to take. Luckily, DigitalOcean have pretty good documentation about it:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/resources/downsize/

If you don’t want to test out the upgrade on your live environment straight away, what you could do is to restore a new server from a backup/snapshot and test the upgrade steps there. That way you will get a better understanding of the whole process and you will also see how your application behaves and if there would be some adjustments needed.

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby