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This account comes from Convertica’s first-person DEV Community post published October 6, 2026. It describes one migration, and its configuration, costs, and outcome have not been independently verified. It is useful as a detailed example of what an agent can do when it has access to real system information—and where the operator kept control.
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Why the service needed a move
The author describes Convertica as a small PDF toolkit with paying users. Its stack ran in Docker on one VPS: Django, Celery, Redis, Postgres, Nginx, and LibreOffice. Heavy conversions—including OCR on a 200-page scan and processing a large spreadsheet—could push a Celery worker into its memory limit. The goal was more memory without simply paying more to the existing host or spending a weekend moving the service.
What changed between the two servers
The figures below are the author’s reported October 2026 comparison, not current provider quotes. The author says they personally checked the destination’s order page before paying.
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| Reported specification | Former host | Destination |
|---|---|---|
| Provider and plan | DigitalOcean droplet | OVH VPS-2 |
| vCPU | 2 | 4 |
| RAM | 4 GB | 8 GB |
| Disk | 80 GB | 75 GB NVMe |
| Reported monthly price | $34.44 | About $12 (44.53 PLN) |
Those numbers do not establish what either provider offers now, or what a particular customer would pay. Before choosing a VPS, compare current regional availability, CPU and memory, storage type and capacity, backup inclusion and cost, IPv6 behavior, billing period, and total price.
The read-only inventory found problems beyond disk space
Before asking the agent to make changes, the author says it performed a read-only inspection. It reported 52 GB used on the old disk, while the Postgres database was 24 MB, uploaded media was 460 KB, and backups were 17 MB. The author attributed much of the remaining space to about 37 GB of old Docker images and 43 GB of build cache.
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Rehearsal caught three issues before DNS changed
The agent reportedly prepared a runbook for provisioning the destination, rehearsing with a database copy, testing HTTPS against the new server before DNS changes, and cutting over with rollback instructions. To test the real domain against the destination IP, the author says they used curl --resolve. Celery beat—the scheduler for recurring jobs—was kept off on the new server during rehearsal so jobs would not run on both hosts.
Celery beat could not write its schedule
A fresh Docker volume was root-owned, but the process ran as an unprivileged user. The author says the agent traced the permissions problem, corrected the volume ownership, and documented the fix.
The Nginx test ran before its container existed
A deployment script tried to run nginx -t inside the destination’s Nginx container before that container had started. The author says the agent changed the check to use a throwaway container from the same image instead.
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Mail delivery needed a new IP allowlist entry
According to the author, Brevo accepted API calls only from whitelisted IP addresses, and the new server used IPv6. The agent identified the mismatch before cutover and supplied the addresses to authorize. This is a reminder to check integrations that restrict access by source IP, not just whether the application itself starts.
How the cutover was handled
The author says the production move proceeded by stopping the app on the old server, restoring a final database dump on the new one, starting the services there, and changing the Cloudflare DNS record. The reported outage ran from 14:44 to 14:50 UTC on a Monday afternoon—six minutes in this case, not a migration-time guarantee.
Afterward, the author redirected CI deployment secrets to the new host and says a later release went through the normal pipeline. The destination used a Cloudflare Origin Certificate and Cloudflare Full (strict) mode. The author also says they tested both direct-IP access and the Cloudflare path with curl.
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What the operator kept under human control
The agent reportedly handled provider research, inventory, runbook preparation, debugging during rehearsal, verification, and cleanup. The author logged into dashboards, paid for the destination, approved commands that affected production, changed DNS, and chose to defer some work. The distinction matters: in this account, the agent helped carry out a plan, while the human retained the decisions and actions with financial or production consequences.
The author’s stated working principles were to begin with read-only access, require evidence such as command output, health checks, or container lists for claimed results, and reserve irreversible actions for the operator. Those are lessons from one migration, not a controlled test of agent capabilities.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.The work continued after the service started
The author reports several follow-up changes that addressed capacity, access, maintenance, and cleanup:
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- Adjusted resource limits for the 8 GB host and restored a dedicated Celery worker for premium jobs.
- Configured the origin to require Cloudflare Authenticated Origin Pulls.
- Added a Docker build-cache size cap after noticing the cache growing by about 8 GB per release.
- Added daily
pg_dumpbackups with 14 days of retention alongside the provider’s daily snapshot. - Enabled VPS auto-renew and deleted the old droplet after checking for remaining billable volumes, snapshots, or reserved IPs.
The author’s account describes the backup configuration and checks performed; it does not establish that a future restore will succeed or amount to an independent security audit.
What this case can—and cannot—tell you
The case shows the value of giving an agent concrete inputs—Compose files, container limits, data sizes, and server state—rather than relying only on a high-level request. Its rehearsal found issues affecting scheduled jobs, deployment validation, and outbound mail before DNS was changed. But one detailed success story cannot establish that another agent, application, or operator will get the same result, or that a migration will be downtime-free.
For a similar move, the account’s practical sequence is to inventory first, rehearse against a copy, verify HTTPS and integrations before changing DNS, prevent scheduled jobs from running twice, and agree on a rollback path. Keep payment, production approvals, and the actual cutover under deliberate human control unless you have independently decided otherwise.
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