What is a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), and how it relates to a private network

What a VPC actually is

Cloud platforms run many customers on shared physical infrastructure: the same racks, switches and hypervisors underpin workloads belonging to entirely different organisations. A VPC is the mechanism that makes that sharing invisible to each tenant. Within a VPC, you get your own private IP address range, your own subnets to divide that range up, and your own routing rules that control how traffic moves between those subnets and out to the internet. Nothing about traffic inside your VPC is visible to, or reachable by, another tenant's workloads on the same underlying platform, even though the physical hardware underneath is being shared across many customers at once.

The isolation is logical, not physical. Two tenants can be running on the very same physical server or the very same switch, and never be able to see or reach each other's traffic, because the platform separates them at the network layer rather than by giving each customer dedicated hardware. That's the core trade-off a VPC makes: the cost efficiency of shared infrastructure, with the network-level isolation of something that behaves like it's your own private environment.

"VPC" as an industry term

VPC isn't a single product with one fixed definition, it's the term the industry generally uses for this pattern of logically isolated networking on shared infrastructure. Different cloud providers implement the same underlying idea under their own product names and with their own specific scope: what counts as a subnet, how routing is configured, what's included by default, and how it's billed all vary from one provider to the next. When you see "VPC" referenced generically, including elsewhere in this knowledge base, it's this pattern being described, not a claim about a specific named Worldstream product called "VPC".

How this relates to Worldstream's own private networking

Worldstream's own networking products cover this same territory, each scoped to its own platform. A Local Network within Flexible VPS gives you a private overlay network connecting your VPS instances, isolated from other tenants on the same platform. Private Cloud's Elastic Network provides the equivalent private networking layer for that product line. Both are Worldstream-specific implementations of the same broader pattern a VPC describes: private address space and isolation on top of shared or dedicated underlying infrastructure, scoped to the specific product they belong to.

For the exact detail of how each of those works, including what's configurable and how they're set up, see the related articles below rather than treating this article as the source for Worldstream-specific specifics. This one is about the general concept and how it maps across the industry, not a restatement of either product's exact feature set.