---
title: Railway Metal
description: Railway Metal is Railwayβs own cloud infrastructure, built for high-performance, scalable, and cost-efficient app deployments. Learn how it works.
---
Railway Metal is the next generation of Railway's underlying infrastructure.
It is built on hardware that we own and operate in datacenters around the world.
Learn more about how we built it in the blog post [So You Want to Build Your Own Data Center](https://blog.railway.com/p/data-center-build-part-one).
## Why?
We are making this move as part of Railway's commitment to providing best-in-class
infrastructure for Railway's users. This change enables us to improve the Railway platform's
performance, unlock additional features, increase reliability, and make
Railway more cost-effective for all users.
With Railway Metal, you can expect the following benefits:
- **Regions for Trial & Hobby plan users**: Railway Metal will be available to
all users, including Trial & Hobby Plan users. Trial & Hobby plan users will
be able to deploy services on all fRailway Metal regions in the US,
Europe, and Southeast Asia.
- **Cheaper Pricing**: Running Railway's own hardware lets us reduce prices. Once
Railway Metal is Generally Available, all users can expect to pay up to 50%
less for Network Egress, and up to 40% less for Disk Usage.
- **Improved Performance**: Services on Railway will run faster. Railway's new CPUs
are more powerful with higher core count and better performance per-core.
Volume read/write performance will also be significantly faster as all
of Railway's disks are NVMe SSDs, which are faster than the disks we could offer
before.
- **Enhanced Reliability**: With Railway Metal, we are able to manage the
hardware, software, and networking stack end-to-end. This allows us to move
faster and fix problems more quickly. (For instance, before Railway Metal,
incidents such as [a single host failure](https://status.railway.com/cm44jp6qh00jydhwlyxsix3vl) would often take us ~60 minutes to bring the host back up. With Railway's own
hardware, we can bring the host back up significantly faster.)
- **Improved Networking**: We connect directly to major internet providers and
other cloud platforms worldwide, giving you faster connections in and out
of Railway.
- **Higher Available Resources**: Railway Metal has greater capacity that we
will be increasing over time, allowing us to offer you more computing
resources on-demand.
- **Unlocks More Features**: With Railway's own hardware and networking stack, we
can power more advanced features that were not possible before, such as
Static Inbound IPs, Anycast Edge Network, High-Availability Volumes, etc.
## Metal edge network
Railway routes traffic through its own anycast Metal Edge network.
You can check if its enabled for your service in the Public Network section in the service settings tab.
Screenshot showing a domain with the Metal Edge Network enabled
Benefits include better routing, less latency, and underlying infrastructure improvements.
## Regions & availability
Railway Metal is available to all users, including Trial & Hobby Plan users.
Each Railway Metal region is located in a datacenter that was chosen
strategically to provide the best possible performance and reliability.
We are in the process of expanding Railway Metal regions, and we expect to
have all regions available by the end of Q1'2025 (by 31 March 2025).
| Railway Metal Region | Status |
| -------------------------- | --------- |
| US West (California) | π’ Active |
| US East (Virginia) | π’ Active |
| Europe West (Amsterdam) | π’ Active |
| Southeast Asia (Singapore) | π’ Active |
## Gradual upgrade
We will gradually move services without a [volume](/volumes)
to Railway Metal as we increase the pool of Railway's hardware and its capabilities.
When this happens, you may see a new deploy initiated by Railway in your service:
Because this is a new deploy of your latest Active deployment, the behaviour
will be the same as if you've manually issued a new deploy. As such, you may
notice that:
- There may be a brief downtime during the upgrade. To prevent this, ensure
you have [Health Checks](/deployments/healthchecks) set up for your service
- All ephemeral storage (such as `/tmp`, etc.) will be wiped. To prevent this,
use [Volume](/volumes) to store data persistently. All storage is
considered ephemeral unless they're on a Railway Volume
Note that the above generally applies to deploying a new version of
your service. The upgrade to Railway Metal is irrelevant to the behaviour
you may run into above - they are the same as if you were to manually deploy
a new version of your service.
For services in `US West (Oregon)`, Railway will not move your service to
Railway Metal if your service [references another service](/variables#referencing-another-services-variable-example) with a volume.
This is to prevent any cross-regional networking latency spikes for your
service. Refer to [this FAQ](#im-experiencing-slow-network-performance-after-switching-to-us-west-california-railway-metal-region-what-should-i-do) for more information.
### Rollback
If you encounter any issues with your service after the upgrade, you can
rollback to the previous version by clicking `Rollback` button in the banner
above.
### Manual rollback
To rollback manually, modify your service's `Settings -> Scale -> Regions`
and select regions without the `Metal (New)` tag.
## Timeline
Railway's transition to Railway Metal will happen in phases. Here's what you can
expect:
| Date | What's Happening | Status |
| ---------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------ |
| Starting December 26th, 2024 | All new deploys on newly-created services without a [volume](/volumes) by Trial & Hobby users will use Railway Metal by default. | π’ |
| Starting January 1st, 2025 | We will be gradually upgrading services _without a [volume](/volumes)_ to Railway Metal. You can learn more about the gradual upgrade [here](#gradual-upgrade). | π’ |
| Starting January 31st, 2025 | All new deploys on all services _without a [volume](/volumes)_ by Trial & Hobby users will use Railway Metal by default. | π’ |
| Starting February 14th, 2025 | All new deploys on all services _without a [volume](/volumes)_ by Pro & Enterprise users will use Railway Metal by default. | π’ |
| Starting March 14th, 2025 | All new deploys on services _with a [volume](/volumes)_ by Trial & Hobby users will use Railway Metal by default. | π’ |
| Starting March 21st, 2025 | We will begin migrating services to Railway metal for Hobby Users | π’ |
| Starting March 28th, 2025 | All new deploys on services _with a [volume](/volumes)_ by Pro & Enterprise users will use Railway Metal by default. | π’ |
| Starting May 2nd, 2025 | We will begin migrating services to Railway metal for Pro Users | π’ |
| Starting June 6th, 2025 | We will begin migrating services to Railway metal for Enterprise Users | π |
The migration is aimed to be completed by the 4th of July, 2025.
## Pricing updates
If you migrate 80 percent of your workloads to Railway Metal, you'll benefit from significantly reduced costs:
- **Egress Fees**: Reduced by 50%, from $0.10/GB to $0.05/GB.
- **Disk Storage**: Reduced from $0.25/GB to $0.15/GB.
These pricing updates are automatically applied once 80 percent of your workloads are running on Railway Metal.
## FAQ
### Is this a free upgrade?
Yes.
### How do I receive the upgrade sooner?
Go to your service's `Settings -> Scale -> Regions`, and select any region
with the `Metal (New)` tag.
Refer to [Regions & Availability](#regions--availability) to see the regions
available for Railway Metal.
### How do I know if i'm on Railway metal?
To check if your service is running on Railway Metal, go to your service's
`Settings -> Scale -> Regions`. If you are on Railway Metal, you will see a
`Metal (New)` tag next to the region.
### Is Railway metal stable?
Yes. We have been running a growing amount of deployments on it for the past
several months. As of the time of this writing, there are ~40,000 deployments
on Railway Metal, and we have not seen any significant issues.
### Is there downtime if I upgrade?
Upgrading to Railway Metal re-deploys your service. This may cause a brief
period of downtime as your new deploy is being set up. You can set up
[Health Checks](/deployments/healthchecks) to prevent this.
### What is the difference between Railway metal and regions?
Railway Metal refers to Railway's own hardware and infrastructure. Regions refer to
the physical location of the datacenter where the hardware is located.
### I'm experiencing slow network performance after switching to us west (california) Railway metal region. What should I do?
You may experience increased latency if your application is communicating with
other services (such as databases) in `US West (Oregon)`. This is caused by the
physical distance between Oregon (the current region) and California
(Railway Metal region).
We recommend switching back to the `US West (Oregon)` region if you are
experiencing increased latency after upgrading to `US West (California)`.
See [Manual rollback](#manual-rollback) for instructions.
### Will Railway stay on gcp?
No. We are migrating completely onto Railway managed hardware.
### Help! After migrating, why do I have increased latency?
It's likely that your database, or service with a volume, isn't migrated over to Metal. Stateful Metal is available starting March 2025. Users who migrate to a different region other than their stateful workload will see increased latency due to the additional physical distance from your service's region. Migrate when your desired region has stateful workloads available after March 2025.
### Why did my costs increase when moving to metal?
Although not intended, Railway Metal, has a different metrics sampler than the legacy hardware. This means that metrics will be quicker to come in, this also meant that legacy was undercounting the amount of resources on the previous hardware. As a result, some metrics like CPU will increase, others, like RAM will usually decrease.
### How do I opt-out?
There is no way to opt-out of Railway Metal. Please [reach out to us](#getting-help)
if you have any concerns.
## Getting help
Please reach out to us [on the Railway Help Station](https://station.railway.com/feedback/feedback-railway-metal-a41f03a1) if you run into any issues. You can also reach out to us over [Slack](/platform/support#slack) if you are
a Pro or [Business Class / Enterprise](/platform/support#business-class)
customer.