Dedicated CPU plans

Pinned physical cores with no sharing, plan categories, vCPU counting, and billing

Dedicated CPU plans (plan codes starting with DC-) give your VM host CPU cores that are pinned to your VM and never shared with, or oversubscribed by, any other VM. They sit alongside the existing Shared Compute (SC-*) plans and use the same purchase flow, VM management, and billing.

Choose dedicated when you need consistent CPU performance: databases, game servers, CI runners, latency-sensitive APIs, or any workload where a noisy neighbor is unacceptable.

Dedicated vs shared compute

	Shared Compute (`SC-*`)	Dedicated CPU (`DC-*`)
CPU allocation	vCPUs scheduled by the hypervisor across shared host cores	Physical host cores pinned to your VM
Oversubscription	Possible; the provider can sell more vCPUs than physical threads	Never; each physical core belongs to exactly one VM
Neighbors	Other VMs can compete for the same cores	No other VM ever runs on your cores
Host type	Runs on the provider's shared nodes	Runs only on the provider's dedicated nodes
Billing	Fixed or usage-based	Identical (see Billing)

On a dedicated plan, both SMT threads (hyper-threads) of every physical core you get are pinned to your VM. Nothing else — not even a sibling thread — is sold to anyone else.

Plan categories

Dedicated plans come in four categories, so you can match the vCPU : RAM ratio to your workload:

Category	Best for
General Purpose	Balanced vCPU and RAM for most workloads
CPU Optimized	Compute-heavy work: builds, encoding, game servers
Memory Optimized	RAM-heavy work: databases, caches, in-memory analytics
Storage Optimized	Disk-heavy work: large datasets, object stores

Plan codes follow the same scheme as shared plans: TIER-CATEGORY-VCPUsC-RAMGB-DISKGB (for example DC-CPU-8C-8G-320 = Dedicated Compute, CPU Optimized, 8 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 320 GB disk).

How vCPUs are counted

A plan's vCPU count is the number of logical threads your VM gets — the same unit shared plans use. Under the hood, allocation happens in whole physical cores:

On hosts with SMT (hyper-threading), one physical core has 2 threads. An 8 vCPU dedicated plan gets 4 physical cores — all 8 threads pinned to your VM.
Both threads of a core always go to the same VM. A physical core is never split between two customers.
On hosts with SMT disabled, 1 vCPU equals 1 physical core.

For example, a host built on an AMD EPYC 9654 has 96 physical cores and, with SMT enabled, 192 hardware threads — NodeRings exposes it as 192 vCPUs of dedicated capacity. A DC-CPU-8C plan on that host pins 4 of its physical cores (8 threads) exclusively to your VM.

This is the standard industry approach for dedicated instances: threads are the unit you buy, cores are the unit of isolation.

Create a dedicated VM

The flow is the same as for shared plans, at /platform/virtual-machines/create.

Pick the Dedicated CPU tier

On the plan selector, choose Dedicated CPU instead of Shared Compute. The tier tab shows the dedicated categories and plans available in your chosen region or from your chosen provider.

Choose category and plan

Pick a category (General Purpose, CPU Optimized, Memory Optimized, or Storage Optimized) and a plan size. Plan rows show the same details as shared plans: code, vCPU, RAM, storage, and price.

Choose OS and buy

Select the operating system, authentication method, and hostname, then confirm the launch summary — exactly as described in Virtual Machines → Create a VM.

NodeRings automatically places the VM on one of the provider's dedicated nodes with enough free cores. Everything after purchase — power actions, console, backups, snapshots — works the same as any other VM.

Billing

Dedicated plans bill exactly like shared plans:

Model	How you pay
Fixed	Upfront monthly flat rate (subscription)
Usage-based	Hourly while the VM exists, with a monthly cap on base compute

Bandwidth egress is metered separately with a free tier, and addons (backups, snapshots, additional IPs) attach the same way. See Billing for details.

A stopped dedicated VM still owns its pinned cores — they are a reservation, not runtime usage. Delete the VM to release the cores and stop billing.

Virtual machines — manage your VM after launch
Marketplace — find dedicated plans by region or provider
Billing — subscriptions, usage, and bandwidth