Frequently Asked Questions

What is Upstash Redis?

Upstash is a serverless database service compatible with Redis® API.

What is a Serverless Database?

• You do not have to manage and provision servers.
• You do not deal with configuring or maintaining any server.
• You just use the service and pay what you use. If you are not using it, you should not be paying.

What are the use cases?

Upstash works for all the common usecases for Redis®. You can use Upstash in your serverless stack. In addition, you can use Upstash as storage (or caching) for your serverless functions. See Use Cases for more.

Do you support all Redis® API?

Most of them. See Redis® API Compatibility for the list of supported commands.

Can I use any Redis client?

Yes, Upstash is compatible Redis client protocol.

Which cloud providers do you support?

Initially we have AWS and GCP. Digital Ocean is planned.

Which regions do you support in AWS?

We start with AWS-US-EAST-1 (Virginia), GCP-US-CENTRAL-1 (IOWA), AWS-US-WEST-1 (N. California), AWS-EU-WEST-1 (Ireland), AWS-APN-NE-1 (Japan). We will add new regions soon. You can expedite this by telling us your use case and the region you need by emailing to [e-mail]

Should my client be hosted in the AWS to use Upstash?

No. Your client can be anywhere but the clients in AWS regions will give you better performance.

How do you compare Upstash with ElastiCache?

Upstash is serverless. With ElastiCache, you pay even you do not use the database. See Compare for more info.

How do you compare Upstash with Redis Labs or Compose.io?

Upstash is serverless. With Redis Labs or Compose.io, you always pay a lot when your data size is big but your traffic is low. In Upstash, the pricing is based on per request. See Compare for more info.

Do you persist data?

Yes, by default we write data to the disk. So in case of a failure you should not lose any data.

Do you support Redis Cluster?

We support replication in Premium type database. We do not support sharding yet.

I have database with 10GB data, I pay nothing if I do not use it. Is that correct?

You only pay for the disk storage cost that is $0.25 per GB. For your case, you will pay$2.5 monthly.

What happens when I exceed the request limit on Free Database (10.000 requests per day)?

The exceeding commands return exception.

When I upgrade my free database, do I lose data?

You do not lose data but clients may disconnect and reconnect.

Upstash is much cheaper than Elasticache and Redis Labs for big data sizes (> 10GB). How is that possible?

Upstash storage layer is multi tiered. We keep your data in both memory and block storage (disk). The entries that are not accessed frequently are removed from the memory but stored in disk. Latency overhead of idle entries is limited thanks to the SSD based storage. Multi tiered storage allows us to provide more flexible pricing.

Will my data be safe?

Upstash is a GDPR compliant company. We do not share any user data with third parties. See our Legal Documents for more information.

How do you handle the noisy neighbour problem? Do other tenants affect my database?

Databases are isolated on some aspects but still share some hardware resources such as CPU or network. To avoid noisy neighbor influence on these resources, there are specific quotas for each database. When they reach any of these quotas they are throttled using a backoff strategy. When multiple databases sharing the same hardware are close to the limits, our system can add new resources to the pool and/or migrate some of the databases to distribute the load.

Also if a database exceeds its quotas very frequently, we notify users whether they want to upgrade to an upper plan. Databases in enterprise plans are placed either on dedicated or more isolated hardware due to higher resource needs.