Upgrading your server
Most upgrades are a short maintenance window. A few are a migration. Knowing which is which before you ask saves a surprise.
What we can do in place
- More memory
- Usually straightforward, if the board has free slots and the existing modules can be matched. Requires a power-down.
- More or faster disks
- Adding drives to free bays is simple. Replacing the system disk means a rebuild or a migration.
- A faster network port
- Often a card swap and a switch port change. Needs a short window and coordination on our side.
- Extra addresses
- No downtime at all — see additional addresses and routed subnets.
What needs a different machine
A different processor generation, a different socket count, substantially more drive bays, or a chassis that cannot take what you now need. In those cases the honest answer is a second server and a migration rather than an upgrade.
That is often better anyway: you build the new machine, test it properly, and switch when you are ready instead of hoping an in-place change goes smoothly. See moving to another server.
How it runs
- Open a ticket describing what you want to achieve rather than the part — “the database is waiting on disk” is more useful than “add an NVMe”.
- We confirm what is possible on that chassis and quote it.
- You pick a window. We do not reboot your machine to suit our schedule — see maintenance and notice.
- Our engineers do the work on site, usually in minutes once the machine is down.
- You confirm it is working before we close the ticket.
Before any window
- Take a backup, and check it restores — testing a restore
- Know how the machine behaves on boot: will the array assemble, will the services
start, is
/etc/fstabreferring to anything that is about to change? - Make sure you can reach remote KVM, so you can watch it come up
- Note the device names you depend on. Adding a disk can renumber them — use UUIDs, as rescue mode explains.
Billing
Upgrades are prorated from when they take effect. Downgrades take effect at the next renewal rather than mid-month, because the hardware is already allocated to you. See contract lengths and payment terms and invoices and payment.
Ask before you buy more
Sometimes the answer is not more hardware. If a machine is slow, the measurements in diagnosing a slow server occasionally show that the limit is a missing index or a misconfigured cache. We would rather tell you that than sell you a bigger server that has the same problem.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base