Moving regions in DigitalOcean is super easy

I was truly amazed how sweat-free moving my Droplet between regions was. Done in a matter of minutes (not counting save times)!

I set up a DigialOcean Droplet in one of the Amsterdam slots a couple of years ago. Not so long ago I've also set up OpenVPN on it and to reduce the distance between me and the server I decided it would be beneficial to move it to the Frankfurt region.

Kept pushing it back, since I imagined it being something very painful and time-consuming until today I finally decided it was time.

As they say in the Apple world there's an app for that, there's a tutorial for virtually anything you might want to do with your Droplet. That's how I set up my OpenVPN server in the first place. The best part being all of them are hosted on DigitalOcean, so you know it's good and maintained.

The migration tutorial said shut down the Droplet and make a snapshot. Then move the snapshot to the region I want. Finally create a new Droplet using the snapshot. Super easy!

Though there was one more thing I had to do, namely update my domain names for my sites running from the Droplet to point to the new IP address. No worries, the Networking tab presented a dropdown with my Droplets for the A records. Couple of clicks and all sites popped back up again (after clearing my DNS cache in Windows)!

Didn't even have to touch anything in OpenVPN!

I'm not running anything fancy; the smallest tier without anything extra. It is possible that the process is not always so easy, but I'm sure those who do hard things have the expertise to go along with it. I was still amazed how little effort I had to put into it.