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Hypervisor/Droplet stanby node

Posted on December 14, 2025

Hi all.

So I’m pretty sure outside of the managed database instances, there’s no standby nodes.

However, I’m looking to confirm another few aspects. If the hypervisor our droplet is on goes down/crashes/hardware failure, does the infrastructure automatically spin up a new droplet for us, porting over our entire droplet, IP, etc? In other words, droplet/hypervisor is running great, all of a sudden a NVMe failed; outside of the time it takes their systems to “realize” it crashed and such, would everything spin back up on a new node without any interaction from us?



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Hi there,

You are generally right. Standard Droplets do not have standby nodes like managed databases.

If a hypervisor has a hardware issue, DigitalOcean automatically attempt to recover the Droplet by restarting it on healthy hardware and keeping the same disk and public IP. In most cases I believe that this happens without user action once the platform detects the failure.

That said, I guess that recovery timing can vary. Because of that, it is best to treat single Droplets as non-HA.

If availability matters, the safer approach is to design for failure using multiple Droplets, load balancers, backups, and snapshots, rather than relying on hypervisor-level recovery alone.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-high-availability-setup-with-heartbeat-and-reserved-ips-on-ubuntu-16-04

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