Can external volumes or block storage be attached to the VPS?

Category: General

Absolutely yes.

Many a times when the projects become huge, the user data generated and stored can run into few 100 GBs and in extreme cases even into TBs. Typically this data will be stored in a data folder within the website root or off it within the user tree. Therefore many IT consultants and experts may advise that you would need to go for a higher specification VPS in order to accommodate this data.

Here we would like to assert that nowadays most VPS vendors offer volumes/block-storage which can be easily attached to a VPS. The price of this volume/block-storage is significantly less that the cost of the VPS.

Lets have a scenario where your PHP project is using 1-2 GB for running the website, but the data folder in itself is using 400 GB . Now here we also assume that your project runs well on a 2 vCPU core 4 GB RAM VPS ( Cloud Pro – Rs.2525 per month – https://n99panel.com/our-plans/ ) . For the CPU and RAM spec required, this VPS spec has only 80 GB SSD. Obviously this would not suffice. Therefore someone may believe that that a higher spec VPS i.e.  Cloud Pro – C8R32 would be required which would cost Rs.18600 per month. But now lets say we were to attach a 400 GB volume to the previous VPS. The price of the volume is Rs.12 per GB per month. Thereby the 400 GB volume would cost Rs.4800 per month. Therefore the total cost would be Rs.2625+Rs.4800 i.e. Rs.7425 per month . thus considerably lower.

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