Best/Cheapest VPS Block Storage Hosting Providers (2024)
Block storage volumes are offered by many hosting providers and can usually be attached to existing servers. I was looking for a cost efficient hosting provider that would allow a specific server I was running to grow in storage space, which is why I wanted to do a quick comparison
Note: there are affiliate links in this post, but I'm not sponsored by any provider and happy to receive more suggestions for this list!
What's Block Storage?
Block storage is a virtual volume (think of it like a hard drive/ssd) that you can plug into your virtual private server.
It increases the storage capacity, so you can flexibly scale the amount of storage required by your web application.
Block Storage vs Object Storage
If you have either unknown or ever growing requirements for data storage, you should consider using object storage like commonly amazon s3 or equivalents. The storage is accessed via a network API instead of acting like a traditional file system. If you have a good idea that you will only need for example 100GB of storage for the forseeable future, block storage might be enough for you.
Other use cases can be database servers as those typically require a traditional file system, also block storage usually doesn't have additional charges for file transfer.
Adding a volume to your vps is usually more cost effective than renting a server that has a lot of storage space, as you might not need as much RAM or dedicated CPUs, but you know your database will require at least 50 GB, which exceeds the default storage space of most VPS.
Vps Providers compared
In the price comparison I'm looking at providers that I used before for hosting of various web projects, like this blog, a mastodon instance, some web crawling workers and a few other things over the years.
Providers and Prices
- Hetzner Cloud - 4.4 EUR
- Linode - 10 USD
- Digital Ocean - 10 USD
- Vultr: HDD - 2.5 USD
- Vultr: SSD/NVME - 10 USD
*Exchange rate from EUR to USD in chart: 1.08
Lowest cloud storage prices
Vultr specifically offers slower access and transfer speed hosting on spinning disks. This might be the right option if you don't need to frequently access the data stored or longer download times can be expected.
The cheapest fast block storage volumes are available via Hetzner cloud, which generally also has relatively low server prices compared to other providers.
The other providers seem to round at 0.10 $ per gigabyte, which makes it easy to calculate, but seems a bit pricey.
Benchmarks
Benchmarks are work in progress, I'm investigating existing io benchmarks or rolling my own to both test copying speeds for large files or a complex file tree under similar conditions with the different providers.