I am using CloudPanel to host all my WordPress websites on a Hetzner VPS and I can say that I am very happy with the setup. I have more than 10 websites hosted on about 9$ VPS with 3 CPUs and 4GB of RAM and they never went down or had performance issues. To set this up I have created some articles that you can check: CloudPanel Install and Hetzner Review.
In this article, we will see how we can safely update CloudPanal to the last version to have the latest fixes and features, doing this will require downtime so you need to prepare in case you have an online store or a heavy traffic website as you will not want to disturb the visitors.
If you are interested to see how the best VPS providers compare check the DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Hetzner article.
First thing is to see if a new version of CloudPanel has been released, to do this the easiest way would be to login into CloudPanel and check the Admin Area, there in the footer you will see the current version and the Update Available text as in the below picture:
In here you will see that you have v2.1.0 and a new version is available. To check the changes done you can visit the CoudPanel Change Log.
If a new version of CloudPanel has been released you should not go and update it on the second day. You should do that only if you have been affected badly by a bug. If you are not in a hurry you should wait for about 1 – 2 weeks to see that everything is stable (this is like a best practice, some are waiting even more).
I didn’t have any issues till now with CloudPanel updates but you never know.
Let’s see all the steps you need to do to safely update CloudPanel they will be done on Hetzner but you can follow them on any VPS provider like DigitalOcean, Vultr, or Linode as they are offering the same functionality.
Always you should have a backup of the VPS in case something goes wrong and you need to restore to the previous version. The easiest way to do that on a VPS is to have a snapshot done, in case you need to restore you can do that fast. This can be done also in CloudPanel Interface but for this, we are going to do it in Hetzner. To have the snapshot done you should go to the VPS under Snapshots and take a snapshot.
Before doing that in case you have a production server you should go and :
sudo service nginx stop
sudo service mysql stop2. Power off the VPS this can be done from the Hetzner admin area
3. Take a Snapshot by going to Snapshots – Take snapshot
4. Power the server on again from Power.
These steps will assure that the snapshot you have taken is consistent and have no problems.
Now as you have a consistent backup that can be used for restoration in case something goes wrong you should go and do the update. You SSH to the VPS and run the below command:
clp-updateThis will update CloudPanel to the last version. You can check the video for the details.
Next, you should go and reboot the VPS server so the changes can be activated to do that you should stop the services and reboot
sudo service nginx stop
sudo service mysql stop
rebootAfter reboot, you should check and see that the services are started and your websites accessible, to do that you should go to Admin – Instance and see the status running for all as in the below picture:
Other checks that can be done are to check the website error logs and to log in to one website and see that is ok.
These are the steps that you should perform to have a safe CloudPanel update, for different websites that you have there it may apply different things, but in big this tutorial can help you keep CloudPanel to the last version. In case you don’t know I have a few articles on CloudPanel that you can check below: