Overview
When deleting your private server, you have the option to permanently delete all users and data, or migrate everything to a different server. Make sure you follow the steps below carefully, otherwise you could potentially lose data on your server.
If you want to migrate your data to a different server
This is most often the case when deleting a private server. This can also be thought of as migrating your private server data to a different hosting plan.
If you wish to keep your website active and migrate it to a different hosting plan, you must already have a Shared or Dedicated Hosting plan active. Only then will you have the opportunity to migrate the data to this new server when you are canceling.
If there is no other hosting service in place, the website will go down and your account will only be available for domain registrations.
Make sure to have another hosting plan active if you wish to keep your site up and running.
- First, make sure you've already purchased a second hosting plan. This could be a Shared, Dedicated, or even another VPS Hosting plan.
- Navigate to the VPS page.
If your VPS RAM usage is too high, you may not see the Delete button. The usage needs to be lowered before you can delete a VPS. View the following article for more information on reducing the VPS RAM memory usage:
- To the right of the VPS under the Actions column, click the red Delete button.
- You are presented with a page that offers you the option to migrate all data to a different server. In the screenshot above, everything is being migrated to a shared server.
- Click Move everything on ps### to <newserver> and then destroy ps###!
When finished, DreamHost sends the account owner an email to confirm the VPS has been deleted.
If you no longer wish to host sites on your private server
If you have a MySQL VPS with 3GB or more of data and no Dedicated server, you cannot use the Delete button in the panel to delete your VPS. You must first decrease the size to less than 3GB for each MySQL VPS database in order to delete the VPS in the panel.
If you no longer need your server to host your websites, you can delete the private server on the VPS page. Make sure you've backed up any necessary data first, as it will not be recoverable after you delete the server.
