The two tiers
In simple terms:
- Standard — the platform may share the underlying physical core with other VMs. Performance is great most of the time but can have brief jitter when neighbors get busy. Best price/CPU.
- Premium — your vCPU is yours alone on the physical core. Performance is predictable and steady. Higher price/CPU but no noisy-neighbor dips.
Recommended starting plans by workload
Each row below names a starting plan — the place to begin, then resize up if you outgrow it. All prices are monthly subscription rates; see Pricing for yearly / 24-month locks.Web and application servers
Databases
Databases are CPU-and-disk-sensitive — almost always pick Premium for consistent I/O.
For databases above ~80 GB, attach a Volume for the data directory so disk size and VM size scale independently.
Background workers, batch, ML
CI/CD runners
Bastion / jump host
Windows workloads
Premium is generally the right pick for Windows — UI responsiveness benefits from dedicated CPU, and Windows has a higher RAM floor than Linux.Game servers
Latency-sensitive — Premium is the right pick for any production game server.How to size in practice
Three rules that beat any sizing chart:- Start one size below what you think you need. Resize up is fast (one reboot, prorated billing). Right-size at month-end with real metrics.
- Watch RAM, not CPU. Most “I need a bigger VM” moments are RAM-bound — the OS starts swapping and everything slows down. CPU saturation is rarer than memory pressure for typical web/app workloads.
- Move data off the VM. If the disk is filling up, attach a Volume; if backups are the issue, Object Storage is cheaper per GB than VM disk. Don’t size up the VM to gain disk.
Plan vs storage vs network — what’s billed where
Related
Pricing
Per-plan rates and lock-in discount table.
Resize
Change plan on a running VM.
Storage model
Where to put data — base disk, volumes, snapshots, backups, Object Storage.