Cloud VPS Block Storage

It is natural that over time the data on your VPS will outgrow its disk space but not necessarily RAM or CPU. Until now upgrading has been costly, but now with Cloud VPS Block Storage you can easily and cost effectively increase your available disk space.

Cloud VPS Block Storage allows you to reliably increase your disk space by up to 5TB on demand. This can all be done in a few clicks in the Memset Control panel or at the point of ordering any new VPS.

How it works

Block storage volumes appear as normal hard disks. They are unaffected by Cloud VPS snapshots and re-images, which means that you can use them to store application data independently from the operating system software.

Please note: Snapshots and re-images will continue to work with the primary SSD volume of your Cloud VPS.

How to upgrade your Cloud VPS

Click on the Upgrade button to add Block Storage to your basket, you will then be able to select how much block storage you require to keep your VPS miniserver running seamlessly.

How to order block storage with a new Cloud VPS

Select the Cloud VPS package that offers the RAM and CPU that you require:

Click on additional block storage and select the size you require:

Managing your block storage volume on Linux

When your Cloud VPS is set up or upgraded with block storage, we automatically mount the new storage to /data. You can then begin using the volume immediately.

Please note: that if you have removed the Memset Admin public SSH key from /root/.ssh/authorized_keys, we will be unable to mount your volume. You may still use it by mounting the block device /dev/xvdd.

root:~# cd /data
root:/data# df -h .
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvdd        20G   17M   18G   1% /data

By default, we create an ext4 filesystem for you. We recommend that you use ext4, however you may use a different filesystem if you wish, by unmounting and re-formatting the volume and then updating /etc/fstab.

Warning: this will destroy all your data on the block storage volume

Using your block storage volume with cPanel

cPanel benefits greatly from storing less performance-hungry sites and backups on block storage.

The best way to do this is with bind mounts, as you will not have to dedicate the whole volume to a single mount point.

Our general recommendation is to do the following. These steps assume that:

Block storage is already mounted to /data. (As-per Managing your block storage volume on Linux).
Backups have completed for the day.

mkdir /home2 /data/home2 # create /home2 directory for storing accounts
mv /backup /data/backup # relocate the current backups to block storage
mkdir /backup # create a new backup directory to mount the block storage to

# create the mount commands, so the block storage is mounted at boot-time.
cat <<EOF >>/etc/fstab
/data/backup            /backup none    defaults,bind                          0 0
/data/home2             /home2  none    defaults,bind                          0 0
EOF

mount -av # mount the new directories.

The last command should show similar output to the following:

/                        : ignored
/tmp                     : ignored
/data                    : already mounted
/backup                  : successfully mounted
/home2                   : successfully mounted

The /backup mount will just start working - backups will now be created on block storage..

Documentation for how to move existing accounts to /home2 on the block storage can be found here:

https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/68Docs/Rearrange+an+Account

New accounts can be created on /home2 if required, during the account creation process.

Manage your block storage volume on Windows Server

Once your Cloud VPS has been set up or upgraded with block storage, you must set the volume in Windows to online in Disk Management. Find Disk Management, also called Create and format hard disk partitions, in the start menu: