Years ago, we got rid of all old style hard disks and replaced all our storage needs with enterprise and data center edition SSDs.

The performance boost to our VPS hosting service was quite large. While hard disks can handle only a few IOPS (input/output operations per second), we can now handle thousands. It allows for a VPS to quickly access data, no matter where in the disk it is stored.

It was a long migration process, which took many months, but in the end, we improved the overall speed of our VPS hosting platform, ColossusCloud. Our clients now enjoy the faster I/O speeds offered by SSD storage.

Now, as the years pass, and our customer's data usage grows, we continue innovating in this field with extensive research on a variety of SSD models in the market.

SSD distributed storage, powered by Ceph.

Not only that, but we use these SSDs in a distributed manner, using the powerful Ceph, a software defined storage system. It replicates the data used by each VPS three times and then distributes those three pieces across multiple servers and multiple SSDs. It doesn't matter if a SSD fails (and they do fail!) or a Ceph server fails, your VPS will continue operating as normal.

SSD greatly improves the disk I/O of your VPS, allowing for you to copy, move and delete files faster, for your applications to open a lot faster and for your applications to manipulate data at faster rates.

The largest SSD disks.

Recently, we have evolved to begin using SSD disks with up to 3.84TBs of capacity, made by Samsung. You can see some of those at our Instagram page.

Our Ceph clusters use a variety of sizes of SSD disks: 960GB, 1.92TB and 3.84TB. As time goes by, we replace the smaller disks with disks of larger capacity, without having to add more nodes to our multiple Ceph installations.

We use several brands, including Sandisk and Micron for our 960GB sizes, Samsung PM863a and Sandisk CloudSpeed models for our 1.92TB disks, and Samsung exclusively for our 3.84TBs. Recently, we have begun testing their new 860 and 883 DCT models, as well as NVMe technology.

SSD + KVM virtualization technology: super fast VPS performance.

And with new KVM virtualization technology and VirtIO drivers, versus our old Xen based virtualization technology, your Linux and Windows VPS can enjoy even faster read/write speeds.

Virtual servers, powered by KVM, are now available at our 6 data centers. Any virtual server you deploy will be based on KVM, while older virtual servers (before February 2019) will still continue running on Xen powered hypervisors.

What is the IO performance you can expect?

We have been able to push a VPS, under KVM virtualization technology, to many gigabytes per second. However, we of course limit the IO speed of a virtual server, in order to ensure that a single customer can not take over all IO capacity.

For example, low end virtual server packages are limited to around 400MB/s (which is far more than enough for 99% of all uses), while some of our higher end packages are limited to 800MB/s.

How to deploy your first SSD based VPS?

To begin deploying a new SSD based Linux or Windows based VPS server, sign up via the form to the left. You will be up and running in no time.