Do you need cloud storage?

There’s no shortage of providers today, from the titans like Google and Apple to storage VPS providers that post offers from our community.  One of the latter that is worth taking a look at is InterServer.

They’ve been providing us great offers on VPS and shared hosting, but they have an intriguing, little-mentioned line of storage servers.  Google will charge you $10/month for 2TB, but you can get 4TB for the same price at InterServer (or get the same 2TBV for only $5/month).

Sure, it’s not apples-to-apples because Google Drive, er One or whatever they’re calling it this week includes a desktop client access, web access, etc.  But if your needs are more around backup than syncing, this is a pretty attractive offer.

After you pick your plan, you’re provisioned an OpenVZ system.  I’m getting a sub-1ms ping from the box to New York City so it’s rather obvious where these are located.  The VPS you’re given is massive (56 cores, 378 GB of RAM, etc.) but of course you’re sharing that with everyone else and you don’t have root.  You do have ssh, and you can easily setup rsync, SFTP, or whatever backup flavor you’d like.

Personally I just manage with the command line but if you’re more of the DirectAdmin type, you can access that way as well, host domains, etc.  I couldn’t find any TOS or AUP that said “on storage servers, you can’t host web sites” and I imagine it’s policed on a “use it as intended” basis.  If you’re backing up and have a lot of inbound SFTP, rsync, etc. that is what the system is intended for.  If suddenly you’re hosting the world’s largest hentai repository, this may not be the plan for you.

I just signed up and am testing it for backing up all my VPS systems.  At present I just rsync all my VPS systems to a local drive, tar up the backup so I have a daily versioned copy, etc.  Works fine, but if I ever need a restore, I’m going to be uploading over my painfully-weak residential uplink.  Having a repository in the sky is very attractive.

One nit I’d point out is that not everything was smooth in the purchase experience.  The PayPal redirect back to the merchant failed but that may be a PayPal thing.  I got an email with my IP, login, and password but no DirectAdmin link.  Appending port 2222 to the IP worked, but I think that could be added to the outgoing email template.  Not major things.

Have you used an InterServer storage server?  What do you think?  Let us know in the comments below!

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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