What is a storage VPS?

How is a storage VPS different from a regular VPS?

A storage VPS trades speed for space: terabytes of hard disk with modest processor and memory, where a regular VPS gives you fast NVMe counted in gigabytes. Both are KVM or similar virtual machines with their own kernel, an IP address and root access over SSH. What changes is the ratio of disk to everything else, and so the price of a terabyte.

What is a storage VPS used for?

Mostly for being the copy that lives somewhere else. The jobs that suit it share one trait: they move large amounts of data now and then, rather than small amounts all the time.

• An off-site backup target. Borg, restic and Kopia push encrypted, deduplicated data over SSH; plain rsync works too.
• Nextcloud or Seafile for a household or a small team, where files dominate and the database stays small.
• An always-on Syncthing node that keeps folders in step while your laptop sleeps.
• Archives: photo libraries, scanned paperwork, finished projects, log exports, build artefacts.
• A second copy of a home NAS, pulled or pushed every night.

What it is not for: busy databases, search indexes, or anything that waits on thousands of tiny disk reads a second. That limit is covered in is an HDD storage VPS fast enough for backups and Nextcloud?

What hardware sits under a storage VPS?

A storage VPS is a slice of a host machine whose hard disks are pooled into one array and shared by every virtual server on it. Your share of the disk is reserved; your share of the array's speed is not, because the same spindles answer your neighbours too. Hosts describe that array in very different detail, as their own pages showed on 2 November 2026:

• Hostbrr: RAID-6 hard disks with an NVMe cache, plus a small NVMe boot disk.
• AlphaVPS: RAID-60 with an NVMe read cache.
• VSYS Host: RAID-10 on the hypervisor.
• LiteServer: 7200 rpm enterprise disks in hardware RAID-10.
• Senko Digital: ZFS in RAID10, with reads and writes capped at 150 MB/s per server.

According to Coffervale's survey of 2 November 2026, 7 of the 18 storage VPS sellers that take crypto and ask no ID publish a RAID level for what they sell, 3 write "RAID" with no level, and 8 say nothing about it. Coffervale is in the last group: Every plan stores your data on hard disks (HDD) chosen for capacity, not speed: they suit backups, archives and file sync, not databases or heavy random reads and writes. We publish no speed or IOPS figure we cannot back. vCPU are shared processor cores; the memory and the disk space of your plan are set aside for your server alone.

Is the RAID on a storage VPS a backup?

No. RAID keeps a server running when a disk dies; it copies your mistakes as faithfully as your data. Delete a folder and the deletion lands on every disk of the array at once. Ransomware that encrypts a share encrypts it on all of them. The Debian Administrator's Handbook puts it in six words: "RAID systems are not backup mechanisms."

Disk redundancy keeps a server running through a failed drive; it does not undo a deletion, ransomware or a lost account, so it is not a backup. A snapshot sits on the same disks as the server it captures, so it can roll back a mistake but it is not an off-site copy.

Where does a storage VPS fit in a backup plan?

As the off-site copy, never as the only one. One storage VPS is one copy in one place. The 3-2-1 rule asks for three copies, on two kinds of media, with one of them off-site: a storage VPS fits as that off-site copy, next to two you keep yourself.

Two habits make that copy worth having. First, encrypt before upload: KVM gives your server its own kernel, so you can put LUKS on the data disk or run ZFS with native encryption, and the keys never leave you. For backups, encrypt on your own machine before upload (Borg, restic and Kopia all do it), so the server only ever holds ciphertext. Second, test a restore, because an archive you have never read back is a hope rather than a backup. We take no backup of your server and keep no copy of your data anywhere else, so what sits on a Coffervale storage VPS should be one of your copies, never the only one. The routine is set out in how do I use a storage VPS for off-site backups?

How much does a storage VPS cost per TB?

On 2 November 2026, storage VPS plans from hosts that take crypto and ask no ID cost from $2.22 to about $51 per TB a month, with a median of $4.00 over 99 plans in stock. A general-purpose VPS from the same hosts cost $223.44 per TB at the median, 56 times more. Storage boxes and backup services sit in between: $3.58 per TB for a 1 TB Hetzner Storage Box, $9.17 at BorgBase, $15.00 at rsync.net.

Every seller, with stock, billing and ID rule, is in what is the least expensive storage VPS per TB right now? At Coffervale, 500 GB costs $1.24 a month and 8 TB $16.75 on the 12-month term.