Expand Hard Drive

For our managed servers, we offer a simple and flexible way to expand the associated hard drives. All server hard drives can be expanded online and without downtime.

Prerequisites

• Storage upgrades up to a maximum of 5 TiB can be performed through our Customer Center
• Your user account must have permission to expand a hard drive

Perform a Storage Upgrade

First, log in to our Customer Center at account.creoline.com and select the server for which you want to perform the storage upgrade.

Next, navigate to the Storage tab and click the “Upgrade” button next to the desired hard drive.

Use the slider to set the new capacity for the hard drive. Please note that, for technical reasons, it is not possible to reduce the hard drive’s capacity after the fact. Then review the preview of the contract adjustment to determine the new monthly price for your server. You can then place the paid order by clicking the Increase Hard Drive button. The storage upgrade will be carried out immediately and billed starting with the next contract period. You will receive a separate email with the order confirmation.

Enable Automatic Expansion

In addition to manually expanding the hard drive, you can also enable automatic hard drive expansion for Linux-based servers based on a defined condition.

Use the sidebar to navigate to Server → Your Server → Hard Drives and select the Automatic Expansion button for the desired hard drive.

Select the desired file system that you want to be automatically expanded in the future. By specifying the condition, you can define the threshold at which automatic disk expansion should begin. You can choose from 80%, 85%, 90%, and 95%.

By specifying the capacity, you can set the increments in which the hard drive should be expanded. You can specify a value between 10 GiB and 200 GiB here.

By specifying the optional capacity limit, you can define the maximum limit up to which the hard drive can be automatically expanded.

The automatic expansion of the hard drive will then be displayed under the current file systems.

Expanding the Partition & File System

After successfully expanding the hard drive capacity, the corresponding hard drive partition and file system must also be expanded, unless the server in question supports automatic file system expansion.

Automatic Partition and File System Adjustment

The following server pre-installations support automatic partition and file system resizing:

*Support depends on the software version used

Manual Partition and File System Adjustment

If the hard drive you want to expand does not support automatic partition and file system adjustment, you must adjust them manually. This section explains how to perform these adjustments for various operating systems.

Debian / Ubuntu

To do this, log in to the server via SSH as the root user and resize the partition. Replace the device name /dev/sda and the partition index with the names from the storage overview. In this example: sda and 1.

apt update && apt install -y cloud-guest-utils

growpart /dev/sda 1

resize2fs /dev/sda1

After adjusting the partition and the file system, you can use the df -h command to verify that the file system expansion was completed successfully.

Windows Server 2019 / Windows Server 2022

Log in to your Windows Server via the web console or Remote Desktop Protocol and open Disk Management.

Right-click the existing partition on the disk you want to extend and select “Extend Volume…” from the menu.

The Extend Volume Wizard will guide you through the process of enlarging the partition. In the second step, you can select the size by which to extend the partition. By default, the maximum possible size is already preselected here, so you can confirm this step by clicking the Next button.

Once the wizard is complete, the enlarged partition will automatically be displayed on the corresponding disk.

You can then close Disk Management and start using the new storage space immediately.