Migrating a DigitalOcean Droplet to AnubizHost

From the DigitalOcean control panel, note the Droplet plan (Basic, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized), the region, attached volumes, Reserved IP, and any firewall rules. Run doctl compute droplet get DROPLET_ID from the doctl CLI for a JSON dump.

Inspect cloud-init: cat /var/log/cloud-init-output.log shows the initial provisioning script. Any user-data needs to be replayed on the AnubizHost target manually or via the panel's user-data field.

Order an offshore VPS matching the Droplet plan. A Basic 4GB/2vCPU Droplet maps to AnubizHost VPS III. Pick Romania for lowest cost (under $25/month), Iceland for the strongest privacy stack, or Netherlands for 10Gbps transit if your workload is bandwidth-heavy.

Pay with BTC or XMR, server is provisioned in under 5 minutes after the second confirmation. SSH in, install matching packages, replicate firewall rules.

From the Droplet, run a full rsync to the new server:

rsync -aHAXv --numeric-ids --delete \
  --exclude={"/dev","/proc","/sys","/tmp","/run","/mnt","/media","/lost+found"} \
  / root@NEW_IP:/

For Managed Databases (separate from Droplet storage), use the DigitalOcean managed DB connection string with pg_dump or mysqldump, then restore on a self-managed database on the new VPS. Or see our Managed DB migration guide.

Lower TTL 24 hours ahead, flip records at cutover. Re-issue Let's Encrypt on the new host: certbot --nginx -d yourdomain.com. For DigitalOcean Spaces (S3-compatible object storage), use rclone or s3cmd to mirror to an AnubizHost MinIO instance - see our Spaces migration guide.

Reserved IPs do not transfer. The new IP becomes your primary, and DNS handles the redirection. Decommission the Droplet only after 7 days of confirmed clean traffic on the new host.

DigitalOcean is US-incorporated and responds to US legal process. AnubizHost runs from offshore jurisdictions where takedowns require local court orders. Pricing is also competitive: an offshore VPS at AnubizHost starts at $17.90/month, often less than the equivalent Droplet, with full root and DDoS protection included. Related reading: offshore VPS, AWS EC2 migration, switching from GCP.