Starting, stopping and reinstalling

From the portal you can power the server on, shut it down, restart it and reinstall it. One operation runs at a time; while it does, the controls are disabled and the page refreshes on its own.

Power

On the server's page, the Power menu has two groups.

Through the operating system (recommended):

• Shut down: shuts the system down cleanly, as the shutdown command does.
• Reboot: restarts it cleanly.

These need working Xen drivers in the system. If the hypervisor cannot see them, the portal says so and only the hard actions are available. If the system has not carried out the request within three minutes, the portal offers the hard version.

Hard — bypassing the OS:

• Power off (hard): cuts the power at once, as though you had pulled the plug.
• Power cycle (hard): cuts the power and starts the machine again.

Data not yet written to disk can be lost with the hard actions. Use them only when the system does not respond.

Reinstalling

Reinstalling erases everything on the disk and rebuilds the server from scratch. It is useful when you want a clean start, a different operating system, or the system is damaged beyond repair.

1. Save anything you need first. This cannot be undone.
2. On the Recovery tab, under Rebuild server, choose the operating system. Only systems that fit your plan's disk can be chosen.
3. To confirm, type the server's name, then click Rebuild.

After a reinstall:

• the IP address is kept,
• you get a new initial password, again shown once in the portal,
• every SSH key on your account is installed, and if you have a key, password login over SSH is turned off.

Charts and log

• The Charts tab shows CPU, network and disk use over windows from 10 minutes to 1 year. Memory use appears when the guest agent runs on the server.
• The Log tab lists the server's events and the actions started from the portal, in order.