Private networks

Give your servers a private address range to talk to each other — for databases, caches and internal services that shouldn't face the internet.

Create a network

Open Private networks → Create network and choose a name and an address range (CIDR) from the private ranges 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 or 192.168.0.0/16, between /16 and /28 in size — for example 10.10.0.0/24.

Private networks are free, isolated per organization and live in one region (for example us-east). Servers must be in the same region as the network to join it.

Attach servers

Attach a network when creating a server, or later from the server's Networking tab. The server gets a second network interface with an address from the range, configured automatically.

ip -4 addr show
# e.g. eth1: inet 10.10.0.3/24

Example: app + database

1. Create network backend with 10.10.0.0/24.
2. Attach web-1 and db-1.
3. Make the database listen only on its private address, e.g. listen_addresses = '10.10.0.3' for PostgreSQL.
4. Add a firewall to db-1 that accepts nothing from the internet except SSH.