Upgrading to a New Ubuntu LTS Release

If you SSH into an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server, you might see a message that encourages you to simply run a command to upgrade to 22.04 LTS:

Screenshot of terminal showing Ubuntu welcome message.

We strongly recommend against upgrading any server with a command like this for a few reasons. However, we can recommend the following options.

Option 1: Start Fresh

Instead of upgrading your server, we strongly recommend spinning up a fresh new server and copying your sites over to it. This allows you to test that a site works on the new server before flipping the switch on your DNS and sending traffic to it.

Yes, I know, it’s tedious and time-consuming to move a site to another server but SpinupWP makes it much easier with the Move Site feature.

Migrating your sites to a fresh provision of the latest LTS will always be the best option to keep things up-to-date with the most recent releases of important software such as PHP, Nginx, and MySQL.

Keeping Your Server’s IP Address

The usual objection to starting fresh is DNS. If your clients control the DNS for their domains, getting every one of them to update an A record is slow and error-prone, and it’s often the real reason people reach for an in-place upgrade instead.

You can avoid the DNS change entirely by moving the IP address rather than the DNS record. Most providers offer an IP address that can be detached from one server and attached to another in the same region. Provision the new server, move your sites to it, test them using the hosts file trick from that doc, then reassign the IP to the new server. As far as your clients and their DNS are concerned, nothing changed. If something goes wrong, move the IP back and you’re running on the old server again.

The feature goes by a different name at each provider:

  • DigitalOcean: Reserved IPs. A Droplet’s original IP can’t be converted, so this only helps if the old Droplet already has a reserved IP attached. See our DigitalOcean Reserved IPs doc.
  • Vultr: Reserved IPs. Vultr can convert an existing instance’s IP into a reserved IP without a restart, which makes this the easiest provider to retrofit.
  • Hetzner: Primary IPs. The IP can be unassigned and assigned to another server in the same location, but both servers need to be powered off and the network configuration on the server needs updating.
  • Linode/Akamai: IP transfer can move or swap a public IPv4 address between two Linodes in the same data center.
  • AWS EC2: Elastic IPs. An instance’s default public IP can’t be converted, so the old instance needs an Elastic IP already.
  • AWS Lightsail: Static IPs can be reassigned between instances in the same Region.
Manage the reassignable IP from your provider’s dashboard, not from SpinupWP. Leave the server’s IP address in SpinupWP set to the server’s own IP, which is what SpinupWP uses to connect over SSH.

If your current server doesn’t have a reassignable IP, one DNS change is unavoidable, but you can make it the last one. Attach a reserved IP to the new server and point your sites at that instead of the server’s own IP. Next time, you can move the IP instead of updating DNS.

Option 2: Stay on Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04

If you’re on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or 24.04 LTS, they will continue to receive security updates until April 2027 and April 2029 respectively, so it’s completely fine to continue running either for now. If you’re on 20.04 LTS, you should go with Option 1 above.

SpinupWP’s Assistant will point out your older servers that are running a version of Ubuntu that’s approaching end of life (EOL).

For more information, check out our Ubuntu LTS doc.

What About Ubuntu Pro?

Ubuntu Pro is a paid service from Canonical which provides extended support for older LTS releases.

Ubuntu Pro isn’t a great option for servers connected to SpinupWP since we use third-party repositories for PHP and Nginx. These third-party repositories do not provide extended support.

An Ubuntu 20.04 server with Ubuntu Pro would be unable to install new versions of PHP and would not receive any security updates related to Nginx.

For these reasons we suggest sticking to one of the two options above rather than using Ubuntu Pro.