Shutting Down a Project Cleanly
When a project ends, the right way to stop paying for it without losing anything important.
Projects end. The cheapest, safest way to wind one down depends on whether you'll ever need it back.
Might come back later — hibernate
Hibernation costs nothing per hour but holds a snapshot in cold storage (which counts against your storage quota). Wake-up takes 5–30 seconds. Right for "this is dormant for a month or two".
Definitely shutting down — back up first, then destroy
- Take a manual database backup (if there's a database). Download it to your laptop or push to S3 — backups in cold storage are deleted with the database.
- SCP any unique files out of containers/spaces.
- Destroy the resources from their detail pages. Disk, snapshots, and ports release immediately; credits stop bleeding within the hour.