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Updated September 7, 2026 A plan is a fixed bundle of CPU, RAM, and base disk, billed at a single rate. Outbound bandwidth is unlimited on every plan. Picking the right plan is the main sizing decision when creating a VM. The full price list lives on Pricing; this page is the how-to-pick guide.

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The three 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. Standard is burstable: all your vCPUs are available whenever you need them, on top of a sustained level you can hold indefinitely. See CPU and bursting.
  • Premium — half a physical thread is reserved for every vCPU, with burst to the full thread. Performance is predictable and steady. Higher price/CPU but no noisy-neighbor dips.
If you can’t tell which fits, start with Standard. Move workloads to Premium when you can point to a specific symptom (latency p99 spikes, database query timeouts under load, real-time-stream stutter) that guaranteed CPU would solve. 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.

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Web and application servers

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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.

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Background workers, batch, ML

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CI/CD runners

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Bastion / jump host

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Windows workloads

Windows Server runs on its own Windows plan family (not on Standard or Premium): Windows plans are placed on licensed hosts, and the Windows Server Standard licence is a separate $15/mo line on every Windows VM. Prices below are the plan plus the licence. Windows has a higher RAM floor than Linux, so start at 4 GiB for anything beyond a single admin session.

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Game servers

Latency-sensitive — Premium is the right pick for any production game server.

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How to size in practice

Three rules that beat any sizing chart:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
You can change plans on a running VM — see Resize. Disk can grow but cannot shrink, so be conservative there.

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Plan vs storage vs network — what’s billed where

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.
Last modified on September 14, 2026