DigitalOcean Floating IPs

DigitalOcean offers you the ability to assign floating IPs to DigitalOcean Droplets. Floating IPs are static IP addresses that can be reassigned to different Droplets that exist in the same data center. This is useful if you want to implement a failover mechanism. You can assign a floating IP to one Droplet and have a different Droplet with a copy of the application as the secondary server. If the primary server fails, the failover mechanism reassigns the floating IP to the secondary one.

Using DigitalOcean Floating IPs With SpinupWP

Implementing a floating IP usually means that you are configuring a custom hosting setup. For this reason, we don’t support enabling floating IPs from the SpinupWP dashboard. However, you can still enable a floating IP from the DigitalOcean dashboard.

There are two ways you can navigate to the screen to enable a floating IP and assign it to a Droplet.

From the list of Droplets, click on the Droplet you want to assign a floating IP to, then click Enable now next to the Floating IP label at the top of the screen. This takes you directly to the Floating IPs tab on the Networking screen, with the Droplet already selected.

Enable Floating IP from Droplet page

Alternatively, from the Networking screen, click on the Floating IPs tab. Click on the “Search for a Droplet” text field and select the Droplet from the list. You can also enter a partial name of the Droplet, which narrows the options to select from.

Enable Floating IP from Networking page

Whichever way you get there, click the Assign Floating IP button, and Digital Ocean will automatically assign and enable the floating IP to the Droplet.

Floating IP enabled

Once the floating IP is assigned, it’s important to be aware that you should NOT update the IP address of your server in SpinupWP to the new floating IP. The original IP of the server remains intact, you’re just assigning an extra floating IP to that Droplet. You should only manage and assign floating IPs from the DigitalOcean dashboard.