Resizing Your Server When You Run out of Space

One of the regular maintenance tasks you have to carry out on a server is monitoring the disk space. Over time, this could lead to a need to consider resizing your virtual server for many reasons.

  • The server hard disk you chose when setting up the server may not be enough anymore.
  • Over time, the number of sites may be too many for the available disk space.
  • You may have received a notification from us that your backups are failing, and after investigating, discovered that this might be due to the amount of free space on the server’s hard disk.

While it is possible to resize a virtual server hard disk, We strongly recommend against it for a few reasons. However, we can recommend the following options:

Examine Your Disk Space Usage

You can run a disk usage check for unnecessary files and folders taking up space on the hard disk and remove them.

New Server and Move Some Sites

You can create a new server of the same size and move some of the sites on the existing server to the new one.

It will take a little while to move some sites to the new server, but only the sites you are moving are affected so that you can leave popular or high traffic sites on the existing server.

New Server and Move All Sites

Another alternative is to create a new larger-sized server and then move all the sites over. Once all the sites are on the new server, you can shut down the old one.

We recommended this when you want to keep your costs down, as maintaining two servers of the same size is typically more expensive than maintaining one larger server.

Follow your VPS Resize Procedure

If none of these options suit you, the last resort is to resize the virtual server instance manually. We’ve listed the help doc for resizing on the most common providers below: