As the traffic on a website or application grows, the processor, memory or storage of the VPS plan originally chosen may become insufficient. Our KVM VPS plans range from AMD VPS 1 to AMD VPS 32 (1–16 vCPUs, 1–32 GB RAM, 10–320 GB NVMe SSD), and you can upgrade to a larger plan at any time; doing so will increase your processor, memory and storage capacity.

When is an upgrade needed?

Check which resource is running low, as this will determine whether upgrading will help:

• Memory: the free -h command shows low available memory; the system is using swap, or the log shows processes terminated by the OOM killer (dmesg | grep -i oom).
• Processor: top or htop shows consistently high CPU usage, and the load value remains consistently above the number of vCPUs.
• Storage: according to the df -h command, the disk is more than 80–90% full, and it fills up again quickly even after cleaning.

If the slowdown is caused by a faulty query, a configuration that launches too many processes, or a log file that has got out of hand, upgrading will only buy you time. It is worth first checking old log files (journalctl --vacuum-time=14d), unused Docker images (docker system prune) and unnecessary local backups.

Steps for the upgrade

1. Log in to the client portal.
2. Under the ‘Services’ menu item, select ‘VPS’.
3. Select the ‘Upgrade’ option and choose the larger plan.
4. Confirm the change and pay the difference in fees.

Will there be any downtime?

Upgrading CPU and RAM usually involves a brief restart lasting a few minutes for the new resources to take effect. In some cases, storage space can be increased without a restart, but this depends on the virtualisation technology used. If downtime is a critical factor for your service, plan the upgrade for a period of low traffic.

What should you bear in mind beforehand?

• Take a snapshot or create a backup of your VPS’s current state so that you can restore it in the event of a problem.
• Check whether your services (web server, database, Docker containers) start automatically after a restart (use the command systemctl is-enabled <service>).
• If you are upgrading your memory, consider whether your applications will make full use of it: the database or PHP-FPM settings often need to be adjusted manually to accommodate the new capacity.

Checking after the upgrade

• nproc – the number of vCPUs,
• free -h – the amount of memory,
• lsblk and df -h – the size of the disk and the file system.

If the lsblk command already shows the larger disk, but df -h still shows the old size, you will need to expand both the partition and the file system. The steps for doing this are described in our article on expanding the file system.

If you’re unsure which plan to switch to, please contact our support team via the client portal, and we’ll help you choose the right one.