Staging paused or stopped: how to start it again

Staging on DployHub is free. To keep it that way, a staging environment pauses after 7 days without a deploy. Your live environment is never affected. This guide explains what you will see, how to bring staging back, and how pausing interacts with going live.

Symptoms

• You received the "Staging stopped after a week idle" alert.
• Your staging address, for example https://shop-staging.apps.dployhub.com, no longer loads.
• The staging environment shows as stopped in the app.
• Clicking Go live shows "Staging has no working version yet. Deploy to staging first, then go live."

Why staging pauses

Every app has two environments. Staging runs in a free, lightweight container (0.25 vCPU, 256 MB memory, 1 GB storage) so you can test before going live. If nobody deploys to it for 7 days, it is paused to free up capacity. Nothing is deleted: the last built version, its environment variables and its domain are all kept.

Start staging again

There are two ways to bring it back, and both take moments.

1. 1

   Click Start

   Open the app, find the staging environment and click Start. The same version starts again.

2. 2

   Or deploy

   Push to your branch (with auto-deploy on) or click Deploy. A new deploy also starts staging and resets the 7-day clock.

3. 3

   Check it answers

   Open the staging address, or look at the Logs tab for staging to see the app starting up.

Going live while staging is paused

Go live promotes the exact image running on staging to live, with no rebuild. If staging has no working version, you get "Staging has no working version yet. Deploy to staging first, then go live." Start or deploy staging first, confirm it works, then click Go live. Read more in staging and live.

If you just need to restore an earlier live version, you do not need staging at all: use rollback from the Deployments tab.

Staging stopped for another reason

• Someone clicked Stop on staging. Click Start to bring it back.
• The latest deploy failed. Staging keeps its previous working version; see build failed or app not answering.
• The app crashes on 256 MB. Staging has a fixed size, so memory-heavy apps can be killed there; see out of memory.
• Unpaid invoices can lead to environments being stopped. Check your billing page.

You can choose where the pause alert goes, or switch it off, on the alerts settings page. If staging will not start at all, raise a ticket with the app attached.