Read before you buy
Who we're not for.
Shelf sells one thing well: dedicated cores with unmetered bandwidth, priced live and locked at order. The list below is everything it is not. If any of it describes you, stay where you are — the calculator on the front page will say the same.
Regulated industries that need a certificate
No ISO 27001, no SOC 2, no BAA, no HIPAA. If your buyer, auditor or regulator needs a certificate, we are the wrong provider for that workload and we will not pretend otherwise.
Anyone who needs 99.99% or multi-region failover
An instance is one machine in one German data centre. No availability zones, no cross-site redundancy, no automatic failover. You can build redundancy across instances; we cannot promise they sit on separate hardware unless agreed in writing.
Teams built on managed services
No RDS, no Lambda, no SQS, no managed Kubernetes. You get a clean machine with dedicated cores and a public key. Everything above that is yours to run.
Anyone who expects provider backups
There are none. If the host fails, the VM is gone until it is rebuilt. Snapshot to object storage from day one — customers who do never churn over this; customers who find out after an incident leave and tell people. We would rather tell you first.
Crypto miners
Banned outright, no exceptions. See the Acceptable Use Policy in the Terms.
Anyone who wants someone else to hold the pager
We run the host and answer within hours. Your application is yours.
Still here? Then you are probably the predictable-workload, cost-sensitive, technically capable customer this was built for.
Create an account See pricing