Hosting Resource Archival Guideline

Department

Technology

Summary

How to retire a hosting VM whose contract has expired and is not being renewed: snapshot the data, clean up the deploy controller, destroy the VM, remove DNS, then flip the registry record to Archived. Order matters — cleaning the deploy controller after the VM is destroyed is the most common foot-gun and silently leaves orphan state behind.

Table of Contents

Purpose

This guideline standardises the cleanup of expired hosting resources so that snapshots are kept consistently, billing stops promptly, DNS doesn’t dangle, and the deploy controller (Coolify, etc.) doesn’t accumulate orphan entries that a future engineer has to clean by hand.

Scope

Definitions

Pre-flight Checklist

Confirm all of these before touching the provider console.

Step-by-Step Process

Tick each box on the Resource form’s Archival Checklist as you complete the corresponding step.

Step 1. Locate the VM at the Provider

Find the VM by its IP / identifier from the registry. Click into it to confirm:

Step 2. Take a Snapshot

Use the provider’s snapshot/image action. Accept the default snapshot name when the provider auto-generates one — see Provider Quick Reference for the naming pattern Kiluth uses.

✅ Tick Snapshot Taken on the Resource form. Paste the snapshot name/ID into Snapshot ID.

Step 3. Verify the Snapshot Independently

Visit the provider’s Snapshots / Images list (not just the VM’s own backups tab) and confirm the row exists with a real, non-zero size. Once the VM is destroyed, a missing snapshot means the data is unrecoverable — verify before going further.

Step 4. Clean the Deploy Controller (only if VM is Coolify-managed)

⚠️ Order matters — do this BEFORE destroying the VM. Coolify’s cascade-delete tries to SSH the host to gracefully shut down containers. With the host alive that takes seconds; with the host already destroyed it silently hangs and nothing gets removed.

Skip this step entirely if the VM was never registered as a Coolify Server. Quick check: search the customer slug at https://coolify.kiluth.com/servers — if nothing matches, skip to Step 5.

If there is a match, you’ll typically have:

Cleanest path: Server → Danger Zone → Delete with the “Delete all resources (N total)” checkbox checked, then type the server name on the next step → Continue. That cascades through the Application + Databases + Services in one shot.

After the Server is gone, the now-empty Environment can be deleted via Project → Environment → Delete Environment (type the env name to confirm).

🩹 Recovery — if you already destroyed the VM and Coolify entries are stuck: the UI cascade-delete will silently fail. Don’t try clicking each child resource’s “Delete” — same SSH-to-dead-host hang. Use one of the escape hatches below.

Step 5. Destroy the VM

Use the provider’s destroy/terminate action. Two universal rules at the destroy modal:

Wait for the success toast. Confirm the VM no longer appears in the provider’s VM list.

✅ Tick VM Destroyed on the Resource form.

Step 6. Clean DNS

Open the DNS console. Search for records pointing to the VM’s IP, typically by the customer-app slug.

Most DNS consoles support bulk-select + delete. Always type-to-confirm if the console offers it.

✅ Tick DNS Records Cleaned on the Resource form.

Step 7. Flip Registry Status to Archived

On the Resource form in portal.kiluth.com, change Status from Expired → Archived and save.

The doctype’s _auto_set_status early-returns on terminal states (Archived, Deleted), so the value sticks even though before_save runs. The daily scheduler is idempotent on terminal states for the same reason.

If you prefer a one-liner from the browser console on the Resource page:

fetch('/api/method/frappe.client.set_value', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded',
    'X-Frappe-CSRF-Token': frappe.csrf_token,
  },
  body: new URLSearchParams({
    doctype: 'Resource',
    name: 'RESOURCE-XXXXX',
    fieldname: 'status',
    value: 'Archived',
  }),
}).then(r => r.json()).then(console.log);

Verification

You should be able to assert all of the following before considering the archival complete.

Rollback (Customer Comes Back)

Snapshots are retained indefinitely at the provider (cost: roughly used-disk-GB × the provider’s snapshot rate per month — small for typical app servers; check the Provider Quick Reference for current rates). To revive a customer:

Provider Quick Reference

The flow above is provider-agnostic. The concrete tools per provider:

DigitalOcean

Other providers

Add a new subsection here when Kiluth adopts a new provider. Cover at minimum: where the VM list lives, snapshot action and naming pattern, where to verify snapshots, destroy flow, and snapshot pricing.