How-To: Resize a Linode Compute Instance to a smaller plan

The process of moving from a larger Linode plan to a smaller one is different. This is because normally you would select the “Auto Resize Disk” option during the resize process; however, since the total disk space on your plan is shrinking, in order to prevent potential data loss, you must change your disk allocation to be within the target plan’s threshold prior to performing the resize operation.

The steps to do this, with a brief example are included below:

Step 1: Resize the Disk

• Navigate to the Linodes tab in the Cloud Manager
• Select the Linode/Compute Instance which you wish to resize.
• Click on the “Power Off” button near the upper right-hand side of the Cloud Manager.
• After the power off operation has completed, click on the “Storage” menu tab (Located halfway down the page, next to Analytics and Network tabs)
• By default, each Linode will have two disks— a “swap” and “ext4” type disk. The larger of the two should be the ext4 disk. This is the disk we will be resizing.
• Click on the blue ellipsis (…) symbol located to the right of the ext4 disk and select Resize.
• In this example, we will be resizing a shared CPU “Linode 2GB - 50GB” plan, to the cheapest plan option, the “Nanode 1GB - 25GB.”
• As you can see, the ext4 disk by default will be 50688 MB (roughly 50GB) in size, but needs to be below the 25 GB threshold of the smaller target plan. To do this, we need to do a metric to binary conversion.
• Open a new tab and enter the number of GB of storage your desired plan has (in this case, 25 GB) in the form here and copy the “(in binary)” number (In this case, 25600 MB).
• Now remember, the total disk size has to be below 25GB, and we also have a Swap disk that is 512 MB. So we subtract the value of the swap disk from the total of 25600 to get our maximum ext4 disk size: 25600 - 512 = 25088 MB
• Now in the Cloud Manager tab, enter 25088 into the “Size (required)” field.
• Click Resize.*

*Note: Your disk size will not decrease if the amount of existing data utilized on your compute instance exceeds the data covered in your target size. If you need to determine your current data utilization, or remove data from your existing compute instance, see this Linode Community Site post.

Step 2: Change Plans

• Navigate back to the “Linodes” tab.
• Click on the blue ellipsis (…) symbol on the right-hand side of the Cloud Manager.
• Select “Resize”
• Choose the plan you desire (in this case, under the “Shared CPU tab, select Nanode 1 GB”
• Click “Resize Linode”
• After the Linode has been resized, you may click the “Power on” button to complete the process.*

*Note: When resizing a Linode/Compute instance, it will be live migrated to a new host in the same data center. It will retain the same IP address. The total time of the resize operation varies based on the current host load, and a number of factors, such as total file count, and size of the plan you are resizing to. For a 1GB Nanode plan, the operation should only take a few minutes. Linode’s official documentation on resizing a compute instance can be found here.

If you have any issues during the process, you can Open a Support Ticket or give them a call at the numbers below:

U.S. 855-454-6633
Global +1-609-380-7100

Hope that helps to simplify the process a bit!

-Micah