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— Feb 24, 2025 ·

Migrating coolify from one vps to another

When your projects start to multiply, your VPS might struggle to keep up. That's exactly what happened to me recently - my trusty server was gasping for memory as I kept adding more and more applications. Time for an upgrade!

After spotting some affordable VPS options at Layer7, I decided to take the plunge and migrate my entire Coolify setup. Thankfully, I didn't have to figure everything out from scratch - a wonderful soul had already documented the process in this GitHub repo: Coolify Migration.

The Migration Process

The key requirement for a smooth migration is having SSH key-based root access from your source server to your destination server. With that in place, the migration script can work its magic.

However, my journey wasn't entirely bump-free. I encountered a few hiccups along the way:

  1. The first run of the script only installed Coolify itself. I had to run it a second time to get all my containers transferred over.

  2. The Traefik proxy refused to start on the new server. A simple server reboot fixed this issue.

  3. After the technical migration, I needed to update all my DNS records to point to the new server.

What I Migrated

My digital empire consisted of quite a collection:

  • 2 WordPress installations
  • 2 Next.js front-end applications (one of them using one of the WordPress installations as a back-end)
  • 3 Laravel applications with MySQL databases
  • 1 simple PHP application
  • This blog (built with Statamic)

Looking Ahead

While the migration was successful, I'm already planning another move. The performance on this new VPS hasn't been as stellar as I'd hoped. For example, build times for one of my Laravel applications now take twice as long compared to my previous server. But that's a story for another article!