The Great Storage Lie of 2010
If I see one more hosting provider advertising "Unlimited Disk Space," I might just pull the power cord on my own rack. It is January 2011. We are moving past the era of static HTML sites and into rich, database-heavy applications using Magento, Drupal, and WordPress. Yet, most of you are still selecting servers based on how many gigabytes you get for $20.
Here is the cold, hard truth: Space is cheap. Speed is expensive.
In a production environment, your bottleneck is rarely CPU or RAM. It is I/O. Specifically, Disk I/O. When your MySQL database locks up because it is waiting for a mechanical arm to seek data on a 7,200 RPM SATA drive, your 8-core CPU is sitting there doing absolutely nothing. That is "iowait," and it is the silent killer of web performance.
The Hardware Reality: SATA vs. SAS vs. The New SSDs
Most budget VPS providers stack 500 customers on a single server using standard SATA drives. A single SATA drive pushes maybe 75-100 IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). Divide that by 500 users. You do the math. You get a fraction of an operation per second.
Serious infrastructure requires a different approach.
- 15k SAS Drives: The enterprise standard. Faster seek times, higher reliability, but still mechanical.
- RAID 10: Stripping and mirroring. Mandatory for speed and redundancy. If you are running RAID 5 on a database server, you are asking for write penalties.
- Solid State Drives (SSD): This is the frontier. Drives like the Intel X25 series are changing the game. They offer practically zero seek time. While expensive in 2011, the IOPS gain—jumping from 100 to 30,000+—is worth every Krone for high-load applications.
Virtualization: The "Noisy Neighbor" Problem
Not all "Cloud" is created equal. Many budget hosts use OpenVZ (container-based). In OpenVZ, the kernel is shared. If your neighbor decides to run a massive backup script or a `dd` command, your database performance tanks because the disk queue is shared.
This is why at CoolVDS, we advocate for KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) or Xen. These hypervisors provide hardware virtualization. They allow better isolation of resources. We can allocate specific I/O priorities so that your neighbor's bad code doesn't crash your e-commerce store.
Diagnosing the Bottleneck
Don't guess. Measure. Log into your terminal right now.
# Run iostat to see extended stats every 1 second
root@server:~# iostat -x 1
Look at the %util column. If it is consistently hitting 90-100%, your disk subsystem is saturated. It doesn't matter if you add more RAM; you need faster storage.
SysAdmin Pro Tip: If you are stuck on a shared system, use `ionice` to prioritize your critical processes.ionice -c2 -n0 mysqld_safe &
This tells the CFQ scheduler to give MySQL best-effort priority.
Data Sovereignty: Why Norway?
Beyond raw speed, we need to talk about where your data lives. With the US Safe Harbor framework constantly under scrutiny, relying on American giants like Amazon S3 for sensitive Norwegian customer data is a risk. Under the Personopplysningsloven (Personal Data Act) and the supervision of Datatilsynet, you have obligations regarding where your data is processed.
Hosting within Norway isn't just about patriotism; it is about physics and law.
- Latency: If your customers are in Oslo or Bergen, routing traffic through Frankfurt or London adds 20-40ms of latency. Hosting locally via NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange) keeps that ping under 5ms.
- Compliance: Keeping data on Norwegian soil simplifies compliance with local privacy directives.
The CoolVDS Approach
We built CoolVDS because we were tired of the "race to the bottom" in the hosting market. We don't oversell our storage arrays. We are deploying enterprise-grade RAID 10 arrays and rolling out SSD-cached nodes for high-performance needs.
We combine this with robust ddos protection at the network edge, ensuring that traffic spikes—malicious or organic—don't take you offline. If you are serious about performance, stop looking at the GB count and start asking about the disk array backing it.
Ready to eliminate iowait? Deploy a KVM instance on our high-performance storage clusters today. Your database will thank you.