Cloud Servers Overview

Cloud servers are virtual machines you provision in minutes, resize when your workload changes, and manage from KPanel with full root access. This guide covers the three families, the sixteen tiers, managed and unmanaged, where they run, and how they compare with bare metal.

What a Cloud Server Is

A cloud server is a virtual machine on our infrastructure with its own operating system, its own IP addresses, and its own root account. Unlike web hosting, nothing about the software stack is decided for you: you pick the distribution and install whatever you want.

The practical differences from a dedicated server are speed and flexibility. A cloud server provisions in about a minute rather than being physically built, carries no setup fee, and can be moved up the ladder to a larger tier later. What you give up is exclusive use of the underlying hardware, although the Dedicated vCPU family reserves cores for you so the busy-neighbour problem does not apply.

The Three Families

There are three families, and choosing between them is mostly a question of what your software will run on.

ARM covers the Photon, Quark, Lepton, and Muon tiers. These are arm64 machines and they are the cheapest way to get a given amount of vCPU and RAM. Most modern runtimes and databases ship arm64 builds, so for a lot of stacks this is simply the best value. We never emulate x86 on ARM, so anything without an arm64 build will not run. ARM is available in the European regions only and is frequently stock-constrained.

Standard x86 covers Meteor, Comet, Atlas, Apollo, Vega, and Pulsar. This is the compatible default: it runs everything, including precompiled x86-only software with no arm64 release. It costs a little more than ARM for the same shape and uses shared vCPU, which is fine for most workloads but not guaranteed under sustained full load. It is available in Europe and Singapore.

Dedicated vCPU covers Quasar, Orion, Nebula, Nova, Sirius, and Andromeda. This is the backbone range: guaranteed dedicated cores on x86, with no shared-core variance, and it is the only family available in all six regions. You pay more per vCPU because the cores are genuinely yours.

Choosing a Cloud Server Architecture goes deeper on the trade-off, including the specific software that needs x86.

Sixteen Tiers, Two Service Levels

Every one of the sixteen tiers is sold twice.

Cloud VPS is unmanaged. You get root and the machine is yours to run. KPanel still gives you power control, a browser console, snapshots, backups, resize, firewall, and an OS rebuild, but the operating system and everything on it is your responsibility.

Managed Cloud Servers is the same hardware with our engineers looking after the operating system layer: patching, monitoring, and day-to-day administration.

Both lines appear as separate plans, so you choose at the point of sale. See Managed vs Unmanaged Cloud Servers for a full comparison.

Where Cloud Servers Run

Pick the region closest to your users. It is the single largest lever on how fast your site feels, and it cannot be changed after provisioning without rebuilding. Cloud Server Regions and Availability has the detail, including what to do when a tier is out of stock in the region you want.

Browsing and Ordering

1. Sign in to KPanel.
2. Click Cloud Servers in the left sidebar.
3. Click Compute plans to browse every tier, or New Server to go straight to the order form.

The compute plans page tabs across the six families, with a segmented control for Unmanaged and Managed. Each card shows the tier's specification chips, its availability badge, the monthly price in your account currency, and a short guidance panel explaining when to choose that family.

Provisioning takes roughly 60 seconds. The page updates itself while it runs.

The Cloud Servers List

Once you have servers, the list page shows four counters, total, running, stopped, and needing attention, followed by a row per server with its name, specification, IP addresses, location, and status.

Statuses you will see are Pending, Provisioning, Running, Powered Off, Rebuilding, and Failed. Inline buttons reboot, power on, or power off a server without opening it.

Click a server to open its detail page: specifications, connection details including the SSH command, and links to the browser console, the management page, resize, and rebuild.

What You Can Do to a Cloud Server

• Connect over SSH with a key you control. See Connecting to a Cloud Server Over SSH.
• Use the browser console when SSH is not available.
• Resize to a larger tier as your workload grows. See Resizing a Cloud Server.
• Take snapshots before a risky change, and roll back if it goes wrong. See Cloud Server Snapshots.
• Back up on a schedule. See Cloud Server Backups.
• Firewall inbound and outbound traffic. See Cloud Server Firewall.
• Rebuild the operating system from scratch. See Rebuilding a Cloud Server.
• Add storage when the built-in disk is not enough. See Cloud Server Storage.

Cloud Server or Bare Metal?

Choose a cloud server when you want speed, elasticity, and no setup fee, and when a virtual machine is enough. Choose bare metal when you need the whole physical machine, either for single-tenant compliance reasons or because you need more capacity than a virtual machine offers.

Dedicated Servers Overview covers the bare-metal range, and there are two sibling ranges for specialist work: Storage Servers Overview for very large capacity and GPU Servers Overview for accelerated compute.

Getting Help

If a server will not provision, gets stuck in Failed, or you are unsure which family fits your stack, open a ticket from Support in KPanel or email support@kapsulehost.com with the server name and the tier you chose.