On this page
Rebuilding reinstalls the operating system from a fresh template. It is how you switch to a different OS, start again from a clean machine, or recover a server you can no longer get into.
Starting a rebuild
On the Options tab, the Reinstall card is headed Rebuild server and carries the line ⚠ Destructive: back up first. Its Rebuild server button opens the rebuild form.
Opening the form changes nothing. Nothing is wiped until you submit it.
What the form asks for
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Required. The image installed on the fresh disk, grouped by family. Older images carry an EOL badge. |
| Display name | The name this server shows under in the panel. Leave blank to keep the current one. |
| Hostname | The hostname set on the new install. Leave blank to keep the current value. |
| SSH keys | Tick keys from your account to install on the new server. |
| Swap | Swap size. Chips offer Default, 512 MB, 1 GB, 2 GB and 4 GB, with More revealing 256 MB, 768 MB, 1.5 GB, 3 GB, 5 GB, 6 GB and 8 GB. |
Display name is worth knowing about beyond this form. A rebuild is the only place in the panel where a server's display name can be changed. There is no rename control on any other tab, so if the only thing you want is a different name, there is no way to get it without a rebuild.
Only the SSH keys you tick here are installed, into
/root/.ssh/authorized_keys on the new build. Keys from the previous install
are not carried across, and neither are keys sitting on your account that you did
not tick. The panel's own note on the field:
Injected at build time so you can log in without the emailed password.
If the picker says "No OS templates are available for this server right now.", do not read that as a limit on your plan. It is also what you see when the template list could not be fetched. Reload, and open a ticket if it persists.
The confirmation gate
Before Wipe and rebuild will do anything, you have to type the server's name into the box labelled:
Type
your server nameto confirm
The name shown in the label is the one to type. The match is exact, including capitalisation and any spaces inside the name, though leading and trailing spaces are ignored. The button stays disabled until it matches.
While it runs
The form is replaced by a progress panel headed Rebuilding your server:
The disk has been wiped and the new image is being installed. This usually takes 3-10 minutes. You can leave this page.
You can. If you go to the Overview tab you see the same build as a four-step checklist: Allocating resources, Creating the disk, Installing the operating system, Configuring the network. That screen refreshes itself every 8 seconds and swaps back to the normal overview when the build lands.
The steps come from a coarse status value reported upstream, not from a real percentage, so a step can sit unchanged for a while without anything being wrong.
Past 15 minutes the screen adds "Taking longer than usual. Contact support if this persists." A failed build has no state of its own, it never finishes, so that warning is the signal to open a ticket.
After it finishes
The completion screen reads Rebuild complete, with "Your server is back online with the fresh image. A new root password has been emailed to you."
Two ways in that you do control:
- An SSH key you ticked on the form. It is already in
/root/.ssh/authorized_keyson the new install, so you can connect straight away with no password at all. - A root password reset, which puts a password you know on the server. See Resetting the root password.
The console reaches the machine either way, including before you have working credentials, so it is the fallback if neither route gets you in.
One more thing about that completion screen: the panel declares the rebuild finished after about two minutes if it never observed the server go down and come back, which a fast build or a failed one can both look like. Treat Rebuild complete as a prompt to check rather than proof that it worked, and confirm by connecting.
Before you rebuild
- Take your own copy of anything you need. Backups in the panel are a read-only listing and restores go through a support ticket, so they are not an undo button. See Backups.
- Note the current IP address and hostname, so afterwards you can tell at a glance whether either changed.
- Add your SSH keys first. Keys have to exist on your account before the rebuild form can offer them to tick, and a key added after the build starts is not applied to it. See SSH keys.