When you deploy a VPS on our platform, your virtual server’s disk doesn’t live on a single physical drive. It’s stored on Ceph, a distributed storage system that spreads your data across hundreds of SSDs on many different servers. This is the same technology used by large cloud platforms built on OpenStack, and it’s one of the main reasons our VPS hosting stays reliable.
How Ceph protects your data
Ceph takes your virtual disk, breaks it into small chunks, makes multiple copies of each chunk, and distributes those copies across different physical servers and different SSDs. Your operating system just sees a normal disk, but behind the scenes the data is replicated so that no single drive failure or server failure can take it down.
If an SSD fails (and they do, eventually), Ceph automatically re-replicates the affected data to other drives. There’s no downtime, no data loss, and usually you don’t even notice it happened. If an entire hypervisor node goes down, we can start your VPS on another host because the disk isn’t tied to that one machine. It lives in Ceph, accessible from any node in the cluster.
Why SSD matters for VPS hosting
All of our Ceph pools are SSD-only. We don’t mix spinning disks with SSDs. This gives every Linux VPS and Windows VPS consistent I/O performance. Database queries, file reads, boot times, all faster than what you’d get with traditional spinning storage.
SSD-backed Ceph also handles many tenants well. Because SSDs have much higher IOPS than spinning disks, the storage cluster can serve many virtual servers simultaneously without the I/O contention that plagues providers still running on old hardware.
How this compares to local disk
Some VPS providers use local disks (a single SSD or pair of SSDs on each hypervisor). That’s faster for raw throughput, but if that host dies, your data goes with it unless they have a separate backup system. With Ceph, your data survives host failures by design.
The trade-off is that Ceph adds a small amount of network latency to each I/O operation. In practice, on our 10G and 40G networks, the difference is negligible for most workloads. You get the reliability of distributed storage with SSD performance that’s more than enough for web apps, databases, and general server workloads.
We run tens of thousands of Linux and Windows virtual servers on Ceph across our data centers. It’s the storage backbone of our VPS hosting platform. Deploy a VPS and see the performance for yourself, or contact us if you have questions about storage options.