Which Northstar VPS Plan Is Right for Your Application?

Choosing the right Northstar VPS plan comes down to one question: what does your application actually need right now? Not what it might need in two years — what it needs today. Oversizing costs money. Undersizing causes problems. Here is a plain-language breakdown.

The Development plan at $15/month is built for work that is not yet in front of real users. Personal projects, internal tools, staging environments, and prototypes fit here. Two vCPUs and 4GB RAM is enough to run a full application stack — a Next.js frontend, a backend API, and a development database — without any issues.

Production at $29.99/month is the most popular plan for a reason. It covers the majority of real production workloads: SaaS MVPs, B2B apps, customer-facing products, and API services. Four vCPUs and 8GB RAM handles concurrent users comfortably. Most teams stay on this plan from public launch through their first few hundred paying customers.

Performance at $39.99/month is the right upgrade when traffic grows. High-traffic marketing sites, apps with large databases, image processing pipelines, and background job workers all benefit from the jump to 8 vCPUs and 16GB RAM. If you are regularly hitting CPU or memory limits on Production, Performance is the next step.

Compute at $99.99/month is purpose-built for intensive workloads: LLM inference, AI applications, video processing, data pipelines, embedding generation, and anything that needs sustained high CPU with large memory headroom. Sixteen vCPUs and 64GB RAM provides the resource density these workloads require.

If you are uncertain, start on Production. It is sized for the workload most developers actually have, and upgrading is seamless — no migration, no re-provisioning, no downtime. Moving from Development to Production when you launch takes about 30 seconds in the dashboard.

A good rule of thumb: if you are asking whether you need to upgrade, monitor your resource usage first. If CPU regularly exceeds 70% at peak or you are approaching your RAM limit, it is time. If you have comfortable headroom, you are on the right plan.