I’m after some advice I have setup a NextCloud environment on a server with Fasthosts UK. However I want to add block storage, so I can move the volume and store more data.
However I cannot find a block storage company that will let me create block storage without having the server managed in their own environment.
I’ve looked at AWS and was looking now at competitors. Any advice would be appreciated if there are alternative companies to choose from.
Adding block storage to a VPS is the equivalent of adding a physical disk to a physical server - the difference is, of course, that it is a virtual disk presented to a virtual server over a network rather than being physically installed, however, that network connection needs to be as fast as possible and, most importantly, have low latency, otherwise the benefits of using block storage are largely lost.
Or in other words: Block storage is typically used for applications that require low latency and high throughput and IOPS, which cannot be achieved if the storage is located on the other side of the world and connected to your VPS over the Internet.
Also, block storage is relatively expensive per GB compared to regular network storage connected via SMB, NFS, WebDAV etc. or object storage such as S3. Therefore, it is generally not economical to use it solely for file storage.