An instance is a SurrealDB deployment that SurrealDB runs for you.
That covers provisioning, high availability, patching, backups, and version upgrades. You choose a plan, a size, and a region, then connect your application.
Every instance belongs to an organisation, which also holds members, usage, and billing. You operate instances from SurrealDB Studio, or from a terminal with surreal cloud. To run and operate the server yourself, see Self-hosted.
Plans
A dedicated instance runs on one of two plans, and the plan you choose at deploy time fixes the topology of the instance. SurrealDB Earth is the serverless alternative: it runs on the Cloudflare network, has no instance type or node count to choose, and scales to zero when idle. The deploy page selects Earth by default.
| Plan | Topology | How it grows | Storage | Suited to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start | A single node | Vertically, by moving to a larger instance type | A dedicated disk per instance | Development, staging, and workloads that fit on one node |
| Scale | A cluster of three nodes or more | Vertically and horizontally, by using larger nodes or more nodes | Distributed storage shared across the cluster | Production that must survive the loss of a node |
The deploy page sets the plan by the node count: one node is Start, and three or more is Scale. Start offers two workloads of instance type. Burstable is for prototypes, testing and low-traffic workloads, and General Purpose is for steady production traffic. Scale uses General Purpose nodes.
The plan also gates some options. Configurable backup frequency is available on Scale instances only.
Current capacity ceilings and prices are on the pricing page. The deploy page shows what applies to your organisation. For the topology behind each plan, see Architecture.
Where instances live
The Instances section of SurrealDB Studio lists every instance in the organisation you are viewing. Each card shows the SurrealDB version and the region. Use the search box and the Version and Type filters to narrow a long list.
Selecting an instance opens its own workspace. That workspace holds a dashboard of resource use, the schema and query views, and Settings. Settings is where configuration, capabilities, versions, compute, and backups live.
surreal cloud instance list prints the same list in a terminal, and --json makes it scriptable. See surreal cloud instances.
Lifecycle
You control the lifecycle of an instance with four actions.
| Action | Effect | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy | Provisions the instance on the chosen plan, type, and region | Create an instance |
| Resize | Changes the instance type or the storage capacity in place | Scaling |
| Pause | Stops compute and usage billing. Data and configuration are kept, and the instance is unreachable until you resume it | Configure an instance |
| Delete | Destroys the instance and everything stored in it, with no way to recover it | Configure an instance |
The diagram below shows the states an instance passes through for each action.
You cannot change an instance name after deployment. Pick a name a colleague will still recognise in six months, such as api-production rather than db1.
Topics
Create an instance: plan, instance type, region, version, name, and starting data.
Configure an instance: capabilities, compute, storage, pausing, and deletion.
Connect to an instance: SurrealDB Studio, the CLI, SDKs, and HTTP.
SurrealDB Earth: serverless SurrealDB on the Cloudflare network, and its current limits.
Architecture: single-node and multi-node topologies.
Scaling: matching compute and storage to the workload.
High availability: what survives a node failure on each plan.
Backups and recovery: automated snapshots, retention, and restore.
Import and export: moving data with
surreal db exportandsurreal db import.Versions and upgrades: changing the SurrealDB version.
Monitoring: the instance dashboard, metrics, and logs.
Network access: which outbound destinations queries may reach.
Private connectivity: AWS PrivateLink and instance access modes.
Related sections
Organisations: accounts, members, roles, usage, billing, and support.
surreal cloud: the management-plane command-line tool.
Observability: the full metric, audit-log, and slow-query reference.
Self-hosted: running SurrealDB on your own infrastructure instead.