How do I safely power cycle a droplet

Restarting your droplet is a very simple process.

To safely shutdown your server

Log in to your Droplet as the root user and execute:

shutdown -h now

This, will shut down your server down correctly and flush any pending changes to the disk and then terminate the droplet.

Visit the control panel and select your droplet, then the option to power on your droplet.

How to force Shut down?

To force your droplet to shut down so you can reboot it log in to Digital Ocean and select the droplet you wish to shut down.

Press the "power off" switch.

Important Warning: This will be similar to pulling the plug on a running computer and may lead to data corruption. Always check the server is okay once powered back on. Only do this as a last resort!

How do I safely restart/reboot a Droplet server?

Log in to your Droplet as the root user (or any user with root permissions with sudo) and execute:

reboot

This, will do the same as the step above without the need to login to DigitalOcean console and manually boot the server.