News
BackPrice Reductions and New Flavors
Flexibility is one of the many advantages of using cloud services. You have always had the choice of various "compute flavors" at cloudscale.ch that you can switch between at any time with no notice period. Following numerous customer requests, we are now introducing compute flavors with different memory/CPU ratios effective 2022-07-01. In addition to comparable new flavors to replace the existing ones, there are now also "CPU-optimized" and "memory-optimized" flavors to cover the needs of more special workloads. Also effective 2022-07-01, we are reducing our prices: The prices of the new Plus flavors are lowered by 25% and the larger Flex flavors even by 33%!
The right flavor for every use case
Cloud server use cases are as individual as our customers. This is why, from the outset, we have offered flavors in various sizes at cloudscale.ch. And in contrast to with your own physical servers, you can scale your virtual servers in no time with us, always matching your current requirements.
With immediate effect, additional compute flavors with different memory/CPU ratios are available to you. This means that you can book a lot of CPU performance for compute-intensive workloads (e.g. batch processing) without having to pay for unused memory. For other applications, such as certain database setups or the delivery of static files, it may be worth keeping all required data in memory. In this case, you can select a flavor with a relatively large quantity of memory compared to the number of vCPUs or dedicated cores.
Details of the new compute flavors
Starting with the best news: In most cases, our new compute flavors are considerably cheaper than the previous flavors with comparable specifications. And thanks to the wider selection of compute flavors that even better covers the requirements of the most varied use cases, costs for your virtual servers can be further optimized.
The familiar flavor names "Flex" (shared vCPUs) and "Plus" (dedicated cores) have been maintained. They are now composed in a uniform manner according to the scheme Flex-<Memory>-<vCPUs>
and Plus-<Memory>-<Cores>
, which provides immediate clarity in terms of the specifications of the compute flavor in question. We have, however, gone one step further and decided on a purely linear price model:
- Irrespective of whether Flex or Plus, 4 GB of memory now cost CHF 0.5 per day.
- In terms of processing performance, Flex flavors cost an additional CHF 0.5 per vCPU per day, and Plus flavors an additional CHF 1 per dedicated core per day.
This means that a "Flex-4-2" with 4 GB memory (CHF 0.5) and 2 vCPUs (CHF 1) costs CHF 1.5 per day, while a "Plus-32-4" with 32 GB memory (CHF 4) and 4 dedicated cores (CHF 4) costs CHF 8 per day. To make things easier to understand, we will continue to list prices per day (i.e. 24 hours). It goes without saying that you will, however, still benefit from to-the-second billing for your cloud services.
Simply scale to the new flavors
Our new compute flavors are available to you with immediate effect in the cloud control panel and via API. When scaling existing servers, please note that only AMD CPUs will be used for our new flavors, which means that details visible in your server (e.g. in /proc/cpuinfo
) may change.
Where the new flavors are cheaper than the corresponding old flavor with similar specifications, we already apply the lower price to the old flavor, which means that you also benefit if you are not immediately able to scale to a new flavor.
During a transition phase until 2022-08-31, servers can still be started with old flavors via our API. This means that for the time being automated setups, e.g. in Ansible and Terraform, will continue to work and you can take your time adapting them. However, we decided against simple "renaming" of flavors; if our API suddenly returned "Flex-4-2" instead of "Flex-4", tools such as Terraform might unexpectedly identify a need for action. Over the coming days, we will publish an update for users of our Docker Machine Driver and Rancher UI Driver, which will be adapted to our new flavors.
Irrespective of your use case, a cloud server is always suitable as it can be adapted to your current requirements at any time. You can now also enjoy this flexibility at cloudscale.ch if your application is particularly memory- or CPU-heavy as our new flavors enable you to book exactly what you need, while also allowing you to benefit from our new and better pricing.
The right flavor for every taste!
Your cloudscale.ch team