Virtual Machine: Plans, Regions & Billing
TL;DR
A virtual machine is an isolated compute instance with its own vCPU, memory, storage, and network identity, provisioned on shared physical hardware and billed for the time it runs.
Isolation
Resources
Plan Types
Billing
A virtual machine (VM) is an isolated compute environment that behaves like a standalone server: it has its own operating system, vCPU and memory allocation, storage, and network identity. A hypervisor multiplexes many VMs onto shared physical hardware while keeping them strongly isolated from each other.
How cloud VMs are provisioned
Creating a VM on a modern cloud platform is a three-choice operation:
- Region — where the machine physically runs (for LayerRail: East US, East US 2, Central US, UK South, or South Africa North).
- Boot image — the operating system snapshot the machine starts from, such as Ubuntu, Debian, AlmaLinux, or Rocky Linux.
- Plan — the vCPU, memory, and storage bundle, on shared or dedicated cores, with optional GPU capacity.
The control plane schedules the instance, attaches networking, and returns SSH access — typically within a minute or two.
Billing model
Cloud VMs are duration-billed: the meter starts when provisioning begins and stops when deletion completes. Per-minute billing with a monthly cap keeps both short experiments and always-on workloads predictable.
VMs versus containers
Containers share a host kernel and start faster; VMs carry a full OS and offer stronger isolation plus the freedom to run anything — including Windows, game servers, and kernel-dependent software. Many platforms (LayerRail included) run managed services like PostgreSQL and Kubernetes on top of VM-backed infrastructure.
