Managing Cloud Server plans

One of the advantages of our cloud computing platform is the ability to freely change your server configuration, adding or removing CPU cores, RAM, and storage to best suit your needs. UpCloud offers a number of Cloud Server plans, including Starter, Premium and Cloud Native options for you to choose from at server creation.

This article explains the differences between these plans and how to change your server's plan and storage after deployment.

Differences between the plans

Starter plans are designed to offer inexpensive servers for development, testing and hosting non-critical workloads. These plans include all the required components of a functional server, and also a public IPv4 address. Storage is provided with the Standard storage tier, offering a general purpose performance.

Premium plans offer balanced resource configurations that allow predictability in usage and costs throughout the server’s lifetime. These plans comprise a public network IPv4 address, an optional IPv6 address, and a monthly public network transfer quota, as well as the CPU, RAM, and storage – all included for a cost-effective price billed hourly during the lifetime of the server.

Cloud Native plans offer the best possible price by unbundling storage and IPv4 addresses from the plans. Cloud Native plan servers can be used with any storage tier, and network connectivity can be provided either via SDN Private Networks or public IPv4/IPv6 addresses that can be attached at extra cost. Cloud Native plans are designed for ephemeral workloads, containerized applications and hosting microservices architectures.

See Cloud Server configurations for more information on the different plans.

Resizing your Cloud Server

To change your server's plan, log in to the UpCloud Control Panel, open your server's settings and go to the Plan tab.

Starter and Premium servers can switch between Starter and Premium plans using the Starter and Premium tabs. Premium plans can be filtered by Balanced, High CPU and High memory configurations. Cloud Native servers can switch to any other Cloud Native plan.

While the server is running, you can scale it up to a larger plan without any downtime using hot resize. Smaller plans are not available until the server is shut down.

To move to a smaller plan, shut down the server first. With Windows servers, make sure to give the shutdown command from the operating system to safely power off your server. Once the server has been shut down, all plans are available.

Select the new plan. The new monthly cost is shown below the list of plans. Click Save changes to apply the new plan, or Discard changes to keep the current one.

Scaling storage

If you require more storage space, you can scale up the current storage device or attach up to a total of 16 storage devices in the Storage tab of your server settings. You can resize storage devices, and attach or detach additional storage devices, while the server is running. You can find more information about this in our guide for adding and removing storage devices.

We highly recommend taking a backup of your server before resizing storage devices.

To resize a storage device, click Edit next to the device, set the new size and click Save. The new monthly cost is shown below the storage devices.

Note that increasing the size of a storage device beyond what’s afforded by your Cloud Server plan will cause it to be counted as an additional storage device and billed according to our standard pricing.

If you change the size of a previously used storage device, take a look at the instructions for resizing storage to also update it in the OS.

Switching plans

If you require additional memory or CPU temporarily, you can always upgrade to any higher plan and downgrade later. However, note that the storage devices are not automatically resized to allow you to easily return to the original configuration plan. This is because the process of decreasing storage size is a more complex task than increasing storage.

Switching between plans is as easy as selecting your new plan on the Plan tab and clicking Save changes.

Moving to a plan with less storage

Changing the plan doesn't change the size of your storage devices. If your storage device is larger than the storage included in the new plan, the device is no longer part of the plan. The whole device is then billed at standard storage pricing, on top of the new plan price. The new monthly cost on the Plan tab, and its price breakdown, show this before you save.

For example, a server on the 2 cores, 4 GB Premium plan (€26 per month) has a 50 GB MaxIOPS storage device. Moving it to the 1 core, 1 GB plan, which includes 25 GB of storage (€5 per month), gives a new monthly cost of €16.16: €5.00 for the plan and €11.16 for the 50 GB storage device.

To pay only the price of the smaller plan, decrease your storage to the size included in the new plan. Storage devices can't be shrunk, so this means copying your data to a new, smaller storage device and deleting the original one. Follow the guide for your operating system: Ubuntu and Debian, CentOS 8/9, CentOS Stream and Rocky Linux, CentOS 7 or Windows. If you're moving to a Starter plan, see downsizing to a Starter plan.

If you need more server resources, you can always select a larger plan and then scale up your storage device to take advantage of the allocated capacity. Remember to configure the additional storage space also on the OS level by following our resizing storage guide.

Pricing of the plans

Starter and Premium plans combine CPU, memory, storage and a public IPv4 address into a single price, while Cloud Native plans include only CPU and memory, with storage and IP addresses billed separately. Premium plans are a cost-effective way to get started, and their High CPU and High memory configurations offer more resources for CPU and memory intensive applications.

In case you need to add storage, more than is bundled in the Cloud Server plan of your choice, you can always attach additional storage devices. This way your server retains the plan pricing while any extra storage is billed per GB.

If you need to increase the size of the first storage device, go to the Storage tab in your server settings and adjust the storage size to your requirements. Note that you can only increase the storage size this way. To decrease it, see Moving to a plan with less storage.

The Plan and Storage tabs show the new monthly cost before you save. Feel free to try different configurations. Billing changes only after you save.

To find out more about the different plan options, see our pricing page for the in-detail list of hourly costs.