Will a reserved virtual machine (Reserved VM Deployment) load my site faster initially?

Deployments
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Hi! I noticed that when visiting my site, the initial load takes 2-5 seconds. I understand this is because the server goes to sleep when the site has no activity.

My question: if I buy a reserved virtual machine (Reserved VM Deployments), will my site be “always on”, and as a result, the initial load should be down to under a second (assuming my files are all optimized etc.)?

I just want to improve the loading time. Also, will hosting costs be considerably more expensive? e.g. if I have 1,000 users/day on the regular sleepy machine, is the reserved VM 5x more expensive? 10x more expensive? More?

Lastly, is a reserved VM necessary if a user is accessing the site at least every 10-15 minutes? In that event, the server would never shut off, and it would be unnecessary to get a reserved VM, right?

Thanks!

1 Like
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Yes, a reserved VM is always on, and you pay a fixed monthly price for it. If you have users every 10mins, my guess is you probably want to choose this option, but I can’t be sure.

As you have found, there is a trade-off - autoscale can be a lot cheaper if your traffic is low, but sometimes it takes a few seconds to fire the machine up.

Personally, I put everything on autoscale while I am doing early pre-launch testing with clients, and even after launch while their traffic is tiny (usually just them and a handful of friendly early adopters) - this keeps their costs low.

But for sites with real traffic, I would almost always switch to a reserved VM.

As for actual pricing numbers to compare autoscale versus VM - if you can find them on the replit website then you’re a smarter person than I am!!