The Bottleneck Everyone Ignores
Let’s be honest. In 2011, buying a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a minefield. You look at the comparison tables: 2GB RAM, 4 CPU Cores, 100GB Storage. It all looks the same. So you pick the cheapest option, deploy your MySQL database, and suddenly your site crawls. Why? Because you bought storage capacity, not storage performance.
I’ve spent the last six months migrating clients away from "unlimited storage" cloud providers. The story is always the same. Their CPU usage is low, their RAM is free, but the load average is sky-high. The culprit is always I/O Wait.
Most hosting providers in Europe are still stuffing cheap 7.2k RPM SATA drives into massive arrays and over-provisioning them with OpenVZ containers. It’s a recipe for disaster. If one user on that node decides to run a backup or a heavy `rsync` job, your database latency spikes from 2ms to 500ms. Your application hangs. Your users leave.
The SAN vs. Local Storage Debate
There is a trend right now to move everything to centralized Storage Area Networks (SAN). It sounds great on paper—your data is decoupled from the compute node. But in practice, especially over 1Gbps networks, it introduces latency.
For high-performance databases, nothing beats physics. You want the spindle as close to the CPU as possible. This is why we architect CoolVDS differently. We avoid network-attached block storage for our primary instances. instead, we rely on local, hardware-controlled RAID-10 arrays using enterprise SAS drives (15k RPM). It’s old school, perhaps, but it’s battle-tested.
Diagnosing the Problem
Don't take my word for it. Log into your current server and check your disk statistics. If you are running CentOS 5 or 6, install `sysstat` and run this:
yum install sysstat
iostat -x 1Look at the %util and await columns. If your utilization is near 100% but your throughput (MB/s) is low, you are suffering from high seek times, likely caused by a noisy neighbor on the host machine stealing your I/O operations per second (IOPS).
Virtualization Matters: KVM vs. OpenVZ
The virtualization technology you choose dictates your storage performance. A lot of the cheap VPS market in Norway is built on OpenVZ. It’s container-based (sharing the host kernel). It’s efficient for the host, but terrible for isolation.
We prioritize KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) at CoolVDS. Since KVM was merged into the Linux kernel back in 2.6.20, it has matured rapidly. It treats your VPS as a distinct process with its own kernel. This allows us to allocate dedicated block devices to your instance. The result? Consistent I/O performance that doesn't tank just because another customer is unzipping a massive tarball next door.
Pro Tip for 2011: If you are running a heavy MySQL workload on Linux, ensure your filesystem is mounted with the `noatime` flag. By default, Linux writes a timestamp every time you read a file. On a busy database, this is thousands of unnecessary writes per second.
Edit your/etc/fstab:/dev/vda1 / ext4 defaults,noatime 1 1
Data Sovereignty: The US Patriot Act Problem
Performance isn't the only metric. There is a legal storm brewing regarding where your data physically sits. With the US Patriot Act, American authorities can theoretically demand access to data hosted by US companies, even if the server is in Europe (Safe Harbor or not).
For Norwegian businesses, this is a massive risk. The Personal Data Act (Personopplysningsloven) and the Data Inspectorate (Datatilsynet) here in Norway are very clear about the responsibilities of data controllers. By hosting on Norwegian soil—physically in Oslo—you aren't just getting lower latency to the NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange); you are buying legal peace of mind.
Latency to NIX from our data center is typically under 2ms. If you are hosting your Norwegian webshop in a datacenter in Germany or the US, you are adding 30ms to 150ms of round-trip time (RTT) to every database query required to render a page. That adds up.
The Verdict
Stop buying based on gigabytes. Start buying based on architecture. You need dedicated resources, local RAID-10 SAS speed (until enterprise SSDs become affordable for the masses), and strict legal protection.
If you are tired of watching `iostat` and seeing your server stall, it’s time to move. We can provision a KVM instance in Oslo with dedicated I/O throughput in minutes. Don't let your infrastructure be the bottleneck.