The Sheer Power of an NVMe SSD VPS

To talk about the power an NVMe VPS gives to your applications, we must first take a look at the important role that your data storage component plays in your hosting environment as well as look at the history and evolution of disk storage within the context of virtual servers as a whole.

Dependent upon the read and write speeds of your disk, it can either reduce the wait time for any on-disk tasks or greatly increase the amount of time it takes for a task to complete. On the other side of the coin, you also need sufficient storage capacity to meet your ever-changing needs. This is a fine balance that can greatly hinder or boost your workload efficiency, dependent upon the decision you make.

HDD VPS hosting

VPS hosting has come a long way since the days of mechanical disk storage. With traditional HDD based storage, yes, we typically had an abundance of storage capacity to fill, however, the performance of these servers left a lot to be desired. As VPS hosting entails the server’s resource being of a communal fashion, sharing a hard disk with your noisy neighbors could have a horrendous impact on the general performance of your applications. Being able to save a large amount of data is great, but what about when you need to move this data? Moving large amounts of data from a hard drive can take an excessively long-time to complete. Worse yet, while the data is transferring, you’ll have less I/O available, which means that the server’s CPU is often left waiting for hard drive tasks to complete.

Modern VPS often have a network speed of 1Gbps or more. At these speeds, uploads of files from your server are likely to be bottlenecked by the read speed of the HDD. Especially if the physical machine’s hard disk is busy handling the read/write operations of other servers. This prevents you from utilizing the full network potential of a modern VPS.

The cold hard truth is that in today’s day and age, HDD VPS are only particularly useful if you’re looking to store a large amount of data that you don’t plan on moving anywhere any time soon.

The advent of SSD VPS Hosting

SSD VPS hosting burst onto the scene and became widely popular in the early-mid 2010s. Offering substantial execution and task completion time improvements over its predecessor, hosting VPS on an SSD became the new norm. VPS was no longer bottlenecked by sluggish I/O performance and instead became the most powerful component packed into the arsenal of many VPS hosts. The battle then became performance vs capacity, while Sold State Drive VPS was much faster than HDD based virtual servers, the cost per GB of storage spiked just as much as the read/write speeds did. This left anyone who was in need of VPS hosting with a choice between large data storage capacity or significantly improved disk throughput speeds – large and slow or small and fast.
If large amounts of storage capacity weren’t important to you, an SSD VPS was the way to go.

Introducing NVMe VPS hosting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmcRWWLDpiQ

When NVMe VPS hit the scene, all other storage types quaked in their boots. NVMe VPS hosting can perform up to 10x faster than the more standard SSD VPS and typically boasts increased storage capacity (admittedly still substantially less than the high-capacity HDD servers). For optimal performance in modern applications, an NVMe SSD VPS is currently the pinnacle of disk performance. Game VPS NVMe hosting benefits particularly well this latest innovation, with quicker load times and an all-around better experience for the players connected to the game server. NVMe VPS technology can accomplish an astounding amount of operations per second without becoming a bottleneck for the processor.

Even if your VPS host is a bit shady and has packed dozens of people onto the same physical NVMe SSD, the chances of you being affected by your neighbors’ is minuscule, there is plenty of I/O for everyone.

Conclusion

It’s pretty clear that an NVMe SSD VPS host performs vastly superior to any other form of disk storage. As long as you’re not looking to house a large quantity of data, I would highly recommend opting for hosting on an NVMe SSD server than any of the alternatives that are available. While I didn’t want to get too technical in this write-up, Evolution Host has done a great write-up about the technical details of an NVMe SSD VPS and have included some figures and benchmarks that outline the differences between the storage types mentioned here.

For those looking to make their website load faster, their database lookups instant or their game server perform like a rocket, NVMe hosting is the way to go.

Personally, I take a bit of a hybrid approach, I stick all of my applications/mission-critical software on the NVMe of my VPS. For large files that I don’t think I’ll be using much, they go on the HDD. Some hosting providers are nice enough to attach a data disk onto your VPS upon request.

I hope you learned something about the differences between an NVMe SSD, a standard SSD and an HDD from this post and I hope it helps you make the right decision when you’re weighing up your options.
Until next time friends, take care of yourselves.