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Reinstalling your OS

Rebuilding the server from the client area, what a reinstall destroys, and the steps that follow a fresh image.

OS reinstall from the client area is part of every dedicated server, at no extra cost and without a maintenance request. It is the right tool when you want a different distribution, when you are handing the machine to someone else, or when the system is in a state you would rather not debug.

Careful

A reinstall wipes every drive in the machine, including data disks and any array. There is no undo, and we keep no copy. Take your backups off the server first.

Before you start ​

  • Copy out anything you need: data, configuration files, /etc, database dumps, TLS keys.
  • Write down what the machine does. The fastest rebuild is the one where you already know which services to reinstall.
  • Check which IP addresses are attached to the service. Additional addresses have to be reconfigured on the fresh system.

Run the reinstall ​

  1. Log in to the client area and open the service page for the server.
  2. Start the reinstall from that page and pick the system image.
  3. Confirm. The server reboots into the installer and comes back with a new root password, sent to you the same way as at delivery.

The image list covers the mainstream server distributions and the virtualisation platforms described on our virtualisation page. If the image you need is not offered, open a ticket: mounting a custom ISO over the out-of-band console is possible on request.

After the reinstall ​

The machine now presents a different SSH host key. Your client will refuse to connect until you drop the old one:

bash
ssh-keygen -R 203.0.113.10
ssh root@203.0.113.10

Then run the same pass as on a new machine:

Good to know

Keep the rebuild in a script. A server you can reinstall in twenty minutes is a server you can afford to reinstall, which changes what an incident costs you.

Reviewed on September 1, 2026