Author: Matthew Heick

On February 5, 2015, I had signed up with DigitalOcean and checked out my first “Droplet”. It was a 2vCPU host with 2GB RAM and 40GB of storage running Centos 6. You were well worth the cost of $20/month and did everything that I asked.

Today is your last day of life. I’ve moved on to a new host that has 2vCPUs and 2GB of RAM, but 60GB of storage and runs Centos 8. It’s also $5 cheaper.

Before I shut you down and terminate you I’d like to say that you did more than you were designed for. You were excellent in how you handled updates and installing software that you weren’t designed for. You almost had a 4-digit-day uptime but for some reason, I felt the need to reboot you.

[root@VPS ~]# last | grep ^reboot
reboot   system boot  2.6.32-431.1.2.0 Thu Dec 19 09:17 - 14:06 (134+03:49)
reboot   system boot  2.6.32-431.1.2.0 Sun Feb 17 16:50 - 09:17 (304+16:26)
reboot   system boot  2.6.32-431.1.2.0 Sun Dec 30 15:45 - 16:50 (49+01:04)
reboot   system boot  2.6.32-431.1.2.0 Sun Dec 30 15:43 - 15:45  (00:01)
reboot   system boot  2.6.32-431.1.2.0 Mon Dec 10 21:38 - 15:43 (19+18:05)
reboot   system boot  2.6.32-431.1.2.0 Fri Feb 16 11:15 - 21:37 (297+10:22)
reboot   system boot  2.6.32-431.1.2.0 Sat Dec  2 19:59 - 21:37 (373+01:38)
reboot   system boot  2.6.32-431.1.2.0 Sat May 27 10:11 - 19:59 (189+10:48)
reboot   system boot  2.6.32-431.1.2.0 Thu Aug  4 05:06 - 10:11 (296+05:04)
reboot   system boot  2.6.32-431.1.2.0 Thu Feb  5 18:41 - 10:11 (841+14:29)
[root@VPS ~]# shutdown -h now

Broadcast message from mjheick@VPS
        (/dev/pts/0) at 14:07 ...

The system is going down for halt NOW!
[root@VPS ~]#

I’ve shut down other hosts before without giving it a second thought. This, however, is one of the hardest and scariest things I’ve had to do in a long while.

Farewell, my friend at 104.236.197.67. May the bits be ever in your cache.