u/webhostinglab

I tested vertical scaling on a live Cloudways server recently and thought the results might be useful for anyone considering doing it with a production site.

My setup was DigitalOcean in New York. I had a probe checking the site roughly every 1–2 seconds while I triggered a one-step vertical scale.

Cloudways warns:

>“Once started, this process can not be canceled. During scaling, your site will not be accessible.”

It also says average scaling usually takes around 12 minutes.

Here is what I actually measured (UTC):

• 10:49:37 — clicked Proceed
• Site continued returning HTTP 200 for about another 5 minutes
• 10:53:39 — one HTTP 503
• 10:54:45–10:57:27 — complete outage
• 10:57:29 — first HTTP 200 again
• Around 10:58:35 — one timeout and two HTTP 500 responses
• 10:58:44 onward — stable

So the actual period where the site was completely unavailable was about 2 minutes 51 seconds.

From clicking Proceed to the site being stable again was roughly 9 minutes.

Obviously, this is only one test: one server size, one provider, one location and one scaling operation. I wouldn't use it to predict what will happen on every Cloudways server.

I was actually surprised that the complete outage was only around three minutes in this test, given how strongly the dashboard warning makes it sound like the entire scaling process could be downtime.

I also tested a few other operations on the same account:

• New server: dashboard said approximately 7 minutes; nginx responded after about 4m 42s
• On-demand backup: under 30 seconds
• Full restore: about 1m 20s
• Staging push: success logged after 29 seconds, while the live site continued responding

Has anyone here scaled a larger Cloudways server (8 GB+) while serving real traffic?

I'm particularly interested in whether the actual outage window gets longer as the server size increases, or whether it tends to stay in the same ~few-minute range.

I have the full probe logs and screenshots if anyone wants to see the measurements.