Overview
This article answers common questions about DreamCompute — how to sign up, pricing, data center locations, scaling, and data durability.
How do I sign up?
If you already have a DreamHost account, you can sign up from your Control Panel.
What are the pricing plans?
You only pay for what you use, with a maximum monthly expense — no confusing invoices or bills, and no surprise at the end of the month. With any DreamCompute plan, you can easily create virtual machines, block devices, and networks using the DreamCompute dashboard, or via OpenStack APIs and command-line tools. View the following article for example pricing plans and billing details:
Where are the data centers located?
DreamHost cloud services are currently located in the United States but are accessible from anywhere globally. DreamCompute is located in the Ashburn, Virginia (US-East) data center, and DreamObjects is located in the Ashburn, Virginia (US-East) data center.
Will DreamCompute scale?
Yes. You can scale your apps both vertically and horizontally, by creating VMs with additional resources or by spinning up additional VMs to handle similar or diverse infrastructure workloads (for example, creating multiple load balancers, or separating web servers and databases). The unique networking features in DreamCompute enable developers and operations teams to design sophisticated n-tier architectures with many VMs.
Can I scale my disk volume on a running instance?
Yes, you can scale disk volumes that are in use if you use LVM (Logical Volume Manager). Using LVM when mounting your disk volumes is recommended for this reason, because it allows you to continually add more disk space without any service interruption. If you don't use LVM, you would need to mount another (larger) volume, then copy your data from the old volume to the new one.
Can I scale my CPU or memory on a running instance?
Yes. View the article below for instructions on scaling the vCPU and memory resources of a running instance:
Is my data backed up?
If you delete an instance or volume without first copying data off of it or creating an image-based snapshot, that data cannot be recovered.
However, DreamCompute block storage is based on Ceph, which is a highly scalable, redundant, and self-healing storage technology. Ceph is designed to deliver extreme durability of data by creating and managing replicas of your data that are intelligently distributed across zones in different data centers. The system automatically detects potential corruption of data or potential failure or degradation of any storage node and immediately creates new replicas from redundant data copies, delivering enterprise-grade durability.