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KVM with attachable block storage
DO, Linode, Lunanode, Vultr all offer block storage, for about the same price.
Any thoughts on which service is (a) most reliable and (b) most performant? By "service" I mean the block storage service, not the provider overall 
Usage will be email storage, accessed via dovecot.
Thanks !
Comments
Vultr offers 50gb for free, or used to.
@Francisco is, or soon will be doing this.
Probably a promo offer.
I'm not looking for free, I'm quite willing to pay the going rate.
Just soliciting feedback on user experiences
I don't see it on their website. Maybe Coming Soon™
Not looking for a beta product, but something tried & true. Start with 10GB and easily expand in increments to 100GB, maybe 150GB. Some storage redundancy, independent of the host VM. Good performance.
https://www.ovh.com/world/public-cloud/storage/additional-disks/ does this do what you want?
Our block storage at DO has been very reliable and performs quite well. From my perspective I'd rather just not weigh in at all if I couldn't say that honestly. I'm actually transferring 1.5TB of data over to it right now.
Thanks for that. But I've twice had VMs crash and burn at OVH with data loss. I should've learned the first time...
And yes, I had backups, and restored them to a different provider.
Thanks jarland. I've never used DO, but I value your input.
Their current stuff works pretty well from what I can tell. If your crashes were with the older series, then yeah, they sucked and everyone knows it. If they were with the current ones then hmm, that's interesting and troubling so I appreciate the info.
I have been using Lunanode block storage for about 3 years, no problem so far.
Fair, we'll have a beta soon enough.
For what it's worth we're keeping things pretty simple platform side so there's a lot less things to break.
We've already put most of our Vegas storage customers on it and performance has been very good with some adjustments.
Francisco
It was January-March 2016, with a product they called "VPS 2016" -- local disk storage (supposedly SSD but performed like HDD), entry-level was around $3.50 - $4.00 / month as I recall.
Thanks for that. And I see that Lunanode block storage is $0.03/GB/month, compared to $0.10/GB/month are DO, Vultr, Linode.
LunaNode is HDD (Ceph RDB with 3 replicas) while DO/Vultr are SSD.
But the performance difference may not be substantial due to the blocks being distributed across storage nodes.
If you use LunaNode then I would suggest using the Toronto location if possible since that location has several times more storage nodes than Montreal/Roubaix, which makes the performance more stable if a storage node fails.
Personally I use dovecot's dsync feature (https://wiki.dovecot.org/Replication).
@Francisco C'MON . We want it now.
zips
I've had some delays in things, but, making progress
RDMA feels awesome.
Francisco
Thanks for this. Toronto would work fine for me.
I'm unsure about your suggestion of dovecot dsync. Are you suggesting I use it to replicate mail to another LunaNode volume? Maybe in another DC?
It was only down for over 24h for me some weeks ago. Wouldn't call that reliable at all.
I guess I was thinking that, if you have it replicated between two locations, then you don't need to worry as much about having the underlying storage provide redundant replicas, so any VM would do.
But maybe that doesn't work for your use case, e.g. if you want the volume mostly for the large storage size, or for the ability to move it around independently of the VM.
is it still available for free?
it was there, but I cant find it since 2 months ago..
I guess what I want is storage that I can rely on for the next few years, and which I can easily grow as needed. I understand that any system can fail, and I can live with that. There will be an offsite backup (maybe dsync or sync) for worst-case. I'm hoping to minimize the probability of worst-case, without spending a lot.
Data is 6 or 7 years of email for a few local non-profits. Most of my mail users use POP3 from a desktop client and run happily for years within a ~400MB quota. Then there's the few exceptions who don't (for a variety of acceptable reasons). Their budgets are minimal. They pay me pennies and I'm happy to do it for them.
I'm thinking a LunaNode m.1 (1 GB RAM) with an attached volume would do nicely.
I haven't decided whether I should create the m.1 as a volume-backed instance (for greater redundancy) or have it SSD (for better performance).
I don't think Vultr is still doing the 50GB thing. Even if they are, you can get as much as you want at the going rate. It was a promo rate on the first 50GB but it's not limited to that.
However it is (still) limited to NY/NJ, which is kinda lame. And after a year it's still listed as beta, which is also kinda lame.
How long was Gmail beta?
All setup and running nicely on LunaNode. Great platform