Black Friday falls on 27 November 2026, with Cyber Monday on the 30th. If your shop or SaaS takes a serious traffic spike in that window, you have about nine weeks to decide how you are going to carry it. The expensive way is to upgrade everything now and pay for the headroom from October to January. The cheap way is to put the extra capacity on hourly billing and give it back in December.
This is a planning post: what to add, when to add it, what it costs at our prices, and which parts of it you should test before the week that matters.
The shape of the problem
Peak weeks rarely break the web server first. In the order we usually see things fall over:
- The database — connection exhaustion long before CPU saturation, then lock contention on the hot tables.
- Background workers — order confirmations, invoice generation and webhooks queue up behind each other, so customers see success but no email.
- Third-party calls — payment, tax and shipping APIs rate-limit you exactly when you need them, and every retry holds a worker.
- The web tier — last, and the easiest to widen.
That order matters for spending, because it means "add a bigger web server" is usually the least useful upgrade you can buy.
The hourly play
Capacity you need for ten days should cost you ten days. Hourly billing on our shapes makes that concrete — a VPS IV KVM (16 GB, 4 vCPU, 80 GB) is €0.0222 per hour in Bucharest and €0.0361 in Frankfurt:
| Plan | What it carries in a peak week | 10 days hourly, Bucharest | 10 days hourly, Frankfurt | Monthly price, Frankfurt |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS II KVM | An extra queue worker box | €1.99 | €3.00 | €9.00 |
| VPS III KVM | A second application server | €3.34 | €5.33 | €16.00 |
| VPS IV KVM | A read replica or a cache tier | €5.33 | €8.66 | €26.00 |
| VPS V KVM | A bigger database host to fail over to | €10.01 | €14.66 | €44.00 |
Three extra machines for the peak window — a second application server (VPS III), a worker box (VPS II) and a cache or replica tier (VPS IV) — comes to €10.66 in Bucharest or €16.99 in Frankfurt for the ten days. The same three machines bought on the monthly price, and inevitably forgotten until February, are €51 a month in Frankfurt.
One thing to be clear about: hourly is not a discount on running a machine permanently. At around 720 hours the hourly path reaches the monthly price and then passes it, so anything that survives past the sales belongs on the monthly price instead. The break-even numbers are here.
A nine-week timeline
Weeks 1–2 (late September): find the ceiling
You cannot plan capacity you have not measured. Spin up a load generator on an hourly box, point it at a staging copy of production, and find the request rate where your p95 falls apart. Our disposable load-testing setup is exactly this: a machine that exists for three hours and costs a few cents.
Write down the number. Everything else is a comparison against it.
Weeks 3–5 (October): fix the cheap things
Before buying anything: a connection pooler in front of the database, indexes for the queries the load test exposed, cache headers on assets, and a hard timeout on every third-party call. These cost nothing and usually buy more headroom than a shape upgrade.
Weeks 6–7 (early November): build the peak fleet and test it
Create the extra machines now, on hourly billing, and run them for a day against the load test. Then destroy them and keep the image. What you want to avoid is discovering on 27 November that your worker box needs a queue credential nobody has.
Capture your configured machines as images from the client panel — up to three per account, billed at €0.06 per GB per month for stored images — so rebuilding the fleet on the day is a deploy, not a build.
Week 8 (from ~20 November): bring the fleet up and leave it up
Start the peak machines a week early. The cost of a week of idle capacity at hourly rates is a few euro; the cost of provisioning under load is your sales window.
Week 9 (December): give it back
Destroy what you no longer need. Hourly billing stops when the machine is destroyed — not when it is powered off. A shut-down VPS still holds its RAM, vCPU and disk, and still bills every hour.
Credit, warnings and the one thing that ruins a peak week
Hourly services are paid from account credit. Three details worth knowing before the busiest week of your year:
- An account needs at least €5 of credit to create an hourly service, and hours are deducted from the balance as they run.
- We email a warning when your balance is down to roughly 24 hours of runtime at the current burn rate.
- If the balance empties, the service is suspended after a one-hour grace period and terminated 48 hours later.
Before peak week, top up enough credit to cover the whole fleet for the whole window plus a margin, and check the address the warnings go to is one somebody reads on a Friday night. Running out of credit at 22:00 on Black Friday is a self-inflicted outage.
Where to put the extra machines
In the same location as the production stack they are extending, for the same reason you keep a database next to its application: a cross-border hop on every internal call is not what you want on your busiest day. All five of our live locations carry every shape — Bucharest, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Vienna — and the per-location price list shows the difference. Bucharest is the base price everywhere, so if the extra capacity is doing internal work (workers, builds, batch jobs) rather than serving customers directly, it is the cheapest place to put it.
If your peak involves video
Live shopping streams, launch events and 24/7 promo channels are a different profile: sustained outbound bandwidth rather than request concurrency. That is what the streaming plans are for — they run without a per-machine bandwidth ceiling and carry more vCPU than the standard plans at the same memory size. They are monthly-priced rather than hourly, so for a November-only event, one month of a streaming plan is the honest way to buy it: €44.99 for the 8 GB shape in Frankfurt, €34.99 in Bucharest.
What not to do
- Do not upgrade the database an hour before the sale. A shape change means a reboot. Do it in week 6, not on the day.
- Do not add web servers without a health check. Two app servers behind a load balancer that does not notice a dead one is worse than one app server.
- Do not skip the December teardown. The reason hourly capacity is cheap is that you gave it back.
How Noded Can Help
Pick the shapes you need for the peak from the hourly VPS page and build them in early November while there is time to test. If your production database is the bottleneck, our PostgreSQL sizing guide has the shape mapping, and if the load is genuinely beyond what a VPS fleet should carry, a dedicated server for the database with hourly VPS around it is the usual answer.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on the plan — how many machines, which shapes, which location — open a ticket before November. We are quieter in October than we are in the last week of November, and so are you.
FAQ
When is Black Friday 2026?
Friday 27 November 2026. Cyber Monday is 30 November 2026, and in most shops the elevated traffic starts the week before and tails into the first days of December.
Is it cheaper to add hourly machines for peak than to upgrade my monthly plan?
For a window of a couple of weeks, yes, by a wide margin: ten days of a 16 GB shape in Frankfurt is €8.66 against €26.00 for the month. For capacity you keep past a month, the monthly price is the cheaper path.
Can I upgrade my existing VPS instead of adding machines?
Yes, shape upgrades are available in the client panel. Do it in advance rather than during the spike, since it involves a restart.
Does stopping a machine after Black Friday stop the charges?
No. A stopped VPS still holds its resources and still bills hourly. Destroy the machines you no longer need.
How much credit should I hold for peak week?
Enough for every hourly machine for the whole window, plus margin. Multiply each machine's hourly rate by the hours you plan to run it, add them up, and add 50%. Balance warnings arrive at about 24 hours of remaining runtime, which is not much notice on a Saturday.