Your Workload
Typical CRUD web app or REST API. Request-driven, modest per-request compute.
Two instances for failover. Standard for anything customer-facing in production.
Recommended Sizing
Estimated Monthly Cost
| Provider tier | Monthly range |
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How This Estimate Works
Per-user footprint
Each workload type has a typical vCPU/RAM/storage cost per active user, based on common production deployments. Database-heavy and ML workloads need more resources per user than a simple web API.
Peak buffer
Average load isn't peak load. A 30% buffer is a sane default; raise it if you have spiky traffic (flash sales, viral content, batch windows).
Environment multiplier
A single instance has no failover. An HA pair roughly doubles compute for redundancy. A cluster adds more nodes for horizontal scale — storage doesn't scale 1:1 with compute since it's often shared or replicated more efficiently.
Provider tiers are ranges, not quotes
Budget VPS providers, major hyperscalers, and managed/premium tiers all price vCPU, RAM, and storage differently. Use this range to sanity-check a vendor quote or budget line, not as a final number.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this an exact quote from a cloud provider?
No — this is a planning estimate based on typical per-user resource needs and published instance pricing bands. Actual cost depends on your specific app, region, reserved-instance discounts, and provider.
Why does workload type change the sizing so much?
A request-driven web API spends very little CPU per request. A database-heavy app holds larger working sets in memory and does more I/O. ML inference workloads are CPU or GPU intensive per request. Picking the wrong profile under- or over-sizes your infrastructure.
Should I start with Single, HA Pair, or Cluster?
Use Single for dev/staging or truly low-stakes internal tools. Use HA Pair for anything customer-facing in production — it's the minimum for avoiding a single point of failure. Use Cluster once you need horizontal scale beyond what two nodes can handle, or have strict uptime SLAs.
What's a reasonable peak traffic buffer?
30% is a sane default for steady-state apps. Raise it to 50-100%+ if you have predictable spikes (marketing campaigns, month-end batch jobs) or unpredictable viral traffic risk.
How do I convert this into an actual instance type?
Take the recommended vCPU and RAM and match it to the closest general-purpose instance size from your chosen provider (e.g. AWS m-series, GCP e2, DigitalOcean general-purpose droplets), then add the recommended storage as attached block storage.