If you’ve noticed we’ve been a bit quiet lately, it’s because for the last several months we’ve been working on what is probably the largest set of improvements to our Cloud Server infrastructure ever!
And so, I’m very pleased to announce that our new Block Storage Volumes are now available in beta.
Volumes are network-based block storage devices that provide flexible and highly available storage for Cloud Servers. They behave exactly like standard disks that you can format, mount and read/write.
The long and short of it is: you can now build Cloud Servers with any size disk, increase it at any time and even upgrade and downgrade RAM and CPU - in many cases, without even rebooting. And when you stop these servers, you pay only for the storage. But read on for more details.
Volumes are automatically replicated in realtime across three separate storage servers for high availability, so that there are always three copies of your data at no additional cost. Our distributed architecture means that there are no single points of failure. This is all handled seamlessly in the background, so you don’t have to worry about it.
Since volumes are managed independently from Cloud Servers, you’re no longer tied to specific storage to compute ratios.
It’s super easy to create and attach new auto-formatted volumes.
Additional volumes can be moved between Cloud Servers without reboots or downtime.
All volumes (including the boot volume) can be instantly resized. Cloud Servers using block storage can also change server type (RAM/CPU) at any time.
Only pay for the storage you need. Cloud Servers using block storage volumes aren’t billed for when they are shut down. Volumes are billed at 10p per GB/month (free until 1 Sep 2022). No additional IOPS usage fees.
Cloud Servers can have up to six volumes attached and each volume can be up to 4TB.
Block Storage Volumes are backed by enterprise-grade NVMe storage. Cloud Servers build in around five seconds.
Persistent block device naming enables you to identify a volume by a known serial or label inside the Cloud Server, rather than unpredictable OS-assigned labels.
We’ve added some guides to using volumes to our documentation:
Here’s just a taste of some of the features you can expect over the coming months:
If you’re an existing customer you can start using the new block storage server types straight away. If you’re not yet a customer, you can sign up in 2 minutes and get a £50 trial credit.
We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions, so do let us know how you get on.
