Spot Servers

Learn more about our Spot Servers, the way they work and how you can easily start using them.

What are Spot Servers?

Spot Servers allow you to leverage Cherry Servers free server capacity for up to 70% off compared to the standard on-demand price, billed on an hourly basis.

In exchange you give Cherry Servers the right to terminate any of your Spot Server with a two-minute notice given through API, when additional capacity is required for Cherry Servers on-demand services (hourly or fixed-term).

If you have a stateless, fault-tolerant, or self-aware application, you can easily leverage Spot Servers to significantly lower your infrastructure costs without compromising your performance speed.

How do Spot Servers work?

When there is a significant amount of spare on-demand server capacity at Cherry Servers, we assign these machines to a Spot Server pool. Spot Servers can then be ordered through Cherry Servers website, Client Portal or API.

These Spot Server plans are currently included into Cherry Servers Spot Server pool, all available in the EU-east-1 region at the moment:

When you choose to use Spot Servers, your application must be prepared for interruptions, because there is absolutely no guarantee that your server will remain active for any time period. Service Level Agreement (SLA) does not apply to Spot Servers. Nevertheless, we have a very loose Spot Server Termination Policy (see below).

Spot Server Creation

You are welcome to order Spot Servers manually through Cherry Servers website or Client Portal. However, Spot Servers are intended to be deployed automatically through Cherry Servers API. You should use the same API endpoint, as you use to request on-demand servers, but with „spot_market“ variable set to 1.

Here is an example of Spot Server request in JSON when querying our “Servers“ endpoint with a POST method:

{
"plan_id": 86,
"image": "Ubuntu 16.04 64bit",
"region": "EU-East-1",
"hostname": "my-new-spot-instance",
"spot_market": 1
}

Spot Server Termination Policy

There is no auction, so you don‘t have to bother about complex bidding rules, nor worry about being outbided by other users. We do not set a usage time cap either, so your Spot Servers won‘t be automatically terminated after a fixed time frame. The only way to loose a Spot Server is for our on-demand server capacity to drop below a pre-set threshold.

If Cherry Servers on-demand server capacity drops too low, we will initiate Spot Server termination process, taking away as many Spot Servers as needed to meet on-demand order requirements. Termination process always starts with the oldest servers, moving on to servers that were ordered later on.

Spot Server Termination Monitoring

When Spot Server termination process is initiated, you will be notified two minutes beforehand to have time to finish your work, and save any important data to persistent storage. In order to see this notification you have to monitor each Spot Server individually by querying the following “Servers” API endpoint with specific server’s ID to receive termination_date parameter:

https://api.cherryservers.com/v1/servers/{serverId}/termination-date

While termination process is inactive, this termination_date parameter will be set to None. As soon as termination process is initiated, termination_date parameter will be set to a specific termination date - which is normally two minutes ahead - and you should react immediately to ensure a graceful server termination.