I have some Amazon Lightsail Instance, a group of small server used as a load balancer for our SMTP cluster. Amazon Lightsail in short equivalent with DigitalOcean Droplet or Linode Node or a let say it is a simple set of VM comparing to Amazon EC2.
As I started with a basic requirement for an SMTP server, I chose a low-end spec with 1 vCPU and 1 GB RAM for US$ 5/month. Initially, everything went as smooth as expected but it has a slow performance after some plugins added to the server.
Although there are several choices to improve its performance, I decided to upgrade the Lightsail VM into a higher plan. Linode, DigitalOcean and Vultr have this option as well but I don’t see any similar option on the Lightsail until finding it in the Snapshot menu on VM dashboard.
On the home page, choose the instance you want to manage or simply click on an instance
Choose Snapshots.
Choose Create a new instance from the snapshot menu. We must create a snapshot before use it as a base instance to be deployed
On the Create an instance from a snapshot page, we have a few optional settings to decide on at the top. We can accept all the defaults and move on to the next step or choose an appropriate option.
Choose the plan for a new instance. At this point, we can choose to create a larger bundle size (as we cannot create a smaller plan).
Give our instance and disks new, unique names, and then choose Create.
A little bit different with Linode approach and quite similar to DigitalOcean snapshot feature but DigitalOcean has a different menu for upgrading its droplet.
