How Long Does A Server Reboot on DigitalOcean Take? How To Fix When It Is Not Up?

I’m hosting all of my websites on a Ubuntu server hosted on DigitalOcean’s droplet. I needed to update some packages for the current Ubuntu release and once the process completed, it required a system reboot before I could upgrade to a newer Ubuntu version.

There are many ways to reboot the server. You can either use the command lines like “sudo shutdown -r now” or “sudo reboot“, or use the reboot function in DigitalOcean’s control panel. Using command lines are the safest way and it worked great for me in the past. Everything seemed to be working well this time after I executed the command. However, I kept waiting for a few minutes and then one hour later, the system is still not back up.

I was terrified because all my websites were down for a while and I couldn’t wait until receiving a response from their customer support. I created a ticket but it might have had to wait for a couple of days. Fortunately, I did some research and figured out some other users also have this issue after restarting their servers.

In some cases, rebooting DigitalOcean’s droplet via SSH somehow doesn’t boot up the system again and it will be down forever if you don’t take action. Normally, the whole reboot process takes just a couple of minutes and you don’t have to do anything else. If your server is still unresponsive after 10 minutes, you can manually turn off and turn on the droplet in DigitalOcean’s control panel.

You can find the power button on the upper right corner of the screen. I turned off and turned on the droplet and my websites were up almost instantly. If you have the same issue, I really hope this article will help you resolve it quickly.