How to Extend Your Disk After Buying More Storage

Bought the extra-disk add-on for your VPS but your filesystem still shows the old size? That's expected — here's the step you still need to do inside the VM.

Why This Extra Step Exists

When you buy more disk, we grow the underlying virtual disk on our side immediately. But the filesystem inside your VPS (ext4, xfs, whatever you're running) doesn't automatically know new space exists — it was formatted to the old size, and Linux won't just assume it can use more until you tell it to. This is standard behavior for any VPS provider, not something specific to us.

Checking Current vs Actual Size

lsblk
df -h

lsblk shows you the real disk/partition sizes as the kernel sees them (this should already reflect the new, larger size). df -h shows what your filesystem is actually using as its usable space — if this is smaller than what lsblk shows, that's the gap you need to close.

Extending the Partition and Filesystem

The exact commands depend on your partition layout, but the general flow on a typical single-partition Ubuntu setup is:

sudo growpart /dev/vda 1        # grow the partition to fill the new disk space
sudo resize2fs /dev/vda1        # grow an ext4 filesystem to fill the partition

(Use xfs_growfs instead of resize2fs if you're on an XFS filesystem.)

If you're using LVM, you'll instead extend the physical volume, then the logical volume, then the filesystem on top — a few more steps, but the same underlying idea.

Confirming It Worked

Run df -h again — the size shown should now match the new total disk size you purchased.

If Something Looks Wrong

• Double-check the add-on actually shows as active on your service's Upgrade/Billing page — if the purchase didn't go through, there's no new space to grow into yet.
• A reboot sometimes helps the kernel re-read the disk size if lsblk still shows the old total after purchase.
• Not comfortable running partition-resize commands on a production server? Take a backup/snapshot first — while growpart/resize2fs are safe, routine operations, it costs nothing to have a fallback before touching partitions.

This is the one add-on that genuinely needs a manual step on your end — every other VPS add-on (RAM, CPU, bandwidth, IPs) applies with no in-VM action required.