VPS reconfiguration

Technical and financial issues of reconfiguring your VPS plan.

Definitions

When we talk about reconfiguring your VPS plan, we mean altering the amount of memory, disk, data transfer, IP addresses etc. provided to you by BitFolk.

Financial concerns

You should request changes to your VPS plan by contacting BitFolk Support.

The main price list contains all pricing details.

Upgrades

You can order an upgrade at any time. You'll be charged the cost of the upgrade pro rata up until your next payment date.

Downgrades

Anything that reduces the cost of your service will take effect from your next payment date.

Technical concerns

BitFolk will usually be able to perform an upgrade but occasionally might need to move your VPS to another server. If you decide to go ahead and a move is required, that will require your VPS to be shut down for a short period of time, generally less than 2 minutes. BitFolk will need to do the work and will coordinate a time with you.

As long as a server move is not required, other reconfigurations can take place quickly and to your own time scale.

Memory

Additions

Once you have heard from BitFolk that reconfiguration has taken place, you will need to reboot your VPS. Once booted you will see the new memory amount. You can do this at any time convenient to you.

Removals

Memory can be removed from your VPS while it is online. BitFolk will do it just after your next payment period starts.

Storage

Growing

Main article: Growing filesystems and disks

Once you have heard from BitFolk that reconfiguration has taken place, you will need to shut down (not reboot) your VPS and then boot it again via the Xen Shell console. Once booted you will see that your VPS's main block device and root partition (typically /dev/xvda and /dev/xvda1 respectively) are larger. You then need to grow your filesystem into the empty space using something like:

$ sudo resize2fs -p /dev/xvda1

There are several different styles of disk configuration in use at BitFolk however, and depending on which was in use when your VPS was provisioned, you may need to use a different technique.

With recent guest kernels, on-line resizing of block devices is possible, but a reboot is still necessary for the root partition as a reread of the partition table is required. If putting filesystems (or LVM, etc) directly on block devices then a reboot may not be necessary.

Shrinking

To shrink your disk space it is first necessary to shrink your filesystem, and this cannot be done online. Therefore you will need to agree some downtime with BitFolk. BitFolk will then shut your VPS down at the agreed time, shrink your filesystem and then shrink your block device. Your VPS will then be booted again. This should take no more than a couple of minutes for SSD-backed filesystems. You must ensure that you have enough free space otherwise it will not be possible to do the work.

If you are confident that your VPS shuts down and boots cleanly then there's no need for you to be available during the work.

Data transfer

This is an easy one. Limits on data transfer are purely numbers in a database so once BitFolk has indicated that your reconfiguration has taken place there's nothing more to do.

IP addresses

See the main article on adding an IP address.