Question 1

What is a storage dedicated server, and how is it different from a regular dedicated server?

Accepted Answer

A Storage Server is the same underlying idea as any dedicated server — one physical machine, entirely yours, with no other customer sharing the hardware — but the engineering priority is flipped. Instead of maximising CPU cores or clock speed, these are built around drive bays, RAID controllers and ECC memory, with the range on this page running from a single 500 GB NVMe drive on Essential Storage up to arrays of dozens of high-capacity HDDs on the Elite STOR tiers. CPUs here (Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC options) are sized to keep up with the storage layer rather than to win a benchmark. That combination makes them a natural fit for offsite backups, media and asset archives, large file repositories, or bulk storage sitting alongside a separate, leaner compute server. You still get full root access, hardware RAID and an India-hosted, DDoS-protected connection on every tier; what changes as you move up the range is how much capacity and how many drives sit behind that access.

Question 2

How much storage do I actually need?

Accepted Answer

It's easier to work backwards from what you're storing than to guess at a round number. If you're keeping offsite backups for client sites or a business's working files, take your current data size, add expected growth over the contract term, and then add room for versioning if you plan to keep more than one snapshot at a time — that alone can double or triple the raw figure you started with. If you're archiving media, growth is often faster than people expect: video footage in particular can run into tens of gigabytes per hour even before you're keeping multiple edits or masters. The range here is built so you don't have to over-buy on day one. Essential and Value Storage suit a smaller working archive, Standard and Pro Storage cover the multi-terabyte range most growing agencies and app backends land in, and the Elite SDS and STOR tiers, with arrays running into dozens of high-capacity HDDs, are there for when you're managing hundreds of terabytes as a matter of course. If you're genuinely unsure, it's usually safer to size for growth over the next year or two rather than exactly for today.

Question 3

How does RAID actually protect my data, and which level should I use?

Accepted Answer

RAID spreads your data across multiple physical drives so that one drive failing doesn't mean your data is gone — it means you replace the drive and the array rebuilds. Which level makes sense depends on how you want to weigh capacity against redundancy. RAID 1 mirrors two drives, simple and safe, but you only get the usable capacity of one drive out of the pair. RAID 5 and RAID 6 use parity spread across the array instead, giving you most of the raw capacity back while still tolerating one (RAID 5) or two (RAID 6) drives failing at once, which is the common choice once you're running four or more drives, as several tiers on this page do. RAID 10 stripes mirrored pairs together, trading some usable capacity for both speed and redundancy. With full root and IPMI access on every server here, you — or our team if you've taken the managed option — can configure whichever level fits how much raw capacity you're willing to give up in exchange for protection. Worth saying clearly: RAID protects you against a drive failing, not against accidental deletion, ransomware or a RAID controller fault — it's not a substitute for a separate backup.

Question 4

What's the process if I need to restore data from this server?

Accepted Answer

Full root and out-of-band IPMI access mean you're never locked out of the recovery path, even if the server won't boot into its normal OS — IPMI gets you to a console to diagnose and fix it directly. If a single drive fails inside a RAID array, that's typically the least eventful kind of recovery: the failed disk gets swapped and the array rebuilds in the background while the rest of your data stays accessible the whole time. If you're restoring from an actual backup set rather than rebuilding an array, the exact steps depend on the backup software you're running on the server, since that layer is under your control. Taken the managed add-on instead? Our team can handle drive swaps, RAID rebuilds and restore troubleshooting directly, so you're not the one working through IPMI at short notice.

Question 5

How is this different from cloud object storage or a consumer backup service?

Accepted Answer

Object storage services — the S3-style ones — typically charge per gigabyte stored and, often, per gigabyte you pull back out, which adds up quickly if you're doing frequent restores, testing backups regularly, or serving large media files to users. A storage dedicated server is a flat monthly cost for the whole box, so heavy read or write activity doesn't move your bill the way egress fees can. You also get an actual filesystem and root access rather than an API and a bucket, which matters if your backup software, NAS-replacement setup or media pipeline expects to mount a drive rather than call an endpoint. Consumer cloud backup tools, meanwhile, are built for individuals backing up a laptop; they're rarely designed to hold a business's full client archive, a multi-terabyte media library, or to give you RAID-level control over how redundancy is configured. The trade-off is that you own more of the setup yourself, unless you take the managed add-on and hand that part to us.

Question 6

Are these storage servers managed or self-managed?

Accepted Answer

Both options are available, the same as our other dedicated servers. Self-managed is the default: you get full root and IPMI access and configure RAID layout, backup jobs, monitoring and disk health checks yourself. For a storage server specifically that usually means setting up your backup or archive software, deciding on a RAID level for the drive count you've got, and keeping an eye on drive health over time. If you'd rather not carry that ongoing responsibility, the managed add-on covers setup, security hardening, RAID and drive monitoring and general upkeep, so a degraded array or a failing disk becomes something we catch, not something you discover the hard way.

Question 7

Do I get full root and IPMI access to configure RAID and storage myself?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every server on this page includes full root access plus out-of-band IPMI/KVM, so you can partition drives, build and rebuild RAID arrays, install whichever OS or NAS software you prefer, and reach the console even if the primary OS won't come up. That level of access is what makes it realistic to run this as a genuine NAS replacement or a backup target you fully control, rather than a managed bucket where someone else has already decided how the storage is laid out. If you'd rather not handle RAID configuration directly yourself, that's exactly the gap the managed add-on fills.

Question 8

Is DDoS protection included, and does it matter for a storage server?

Accepted Answer

Yes, always-on network-level DDoS protection is included on every plan here at no extra cost. It matters more than people tend to expect for a storage or backup server specifically, because these machines often sit quietly in the background until the exact moment you need to pull data off them — a restore, a migration, a client emergency — and that's the worst possible time to discover the connection is being flooded instead. The protection runs continuously rather than being something you have to remember to switch on before it's needed.

Question 9

Where are these storage servers hosted, and does that affect backup or restore speed?

Accepted Answer

These are hosted in India, which keeps latency low if the systems backing up to this server, or the team restoring from it, are also based in India. For offsite backup specifically, the distance that actually matters is between this server and your primary systems, not between this server and your end users, since the entire point of an offsite copy is that it's physically and logically separate from wherever your primary data lives. Additional locations outside India are available on request if your primary infrastructure sits elsewhere and you'd rather the backup target sit closer to it.

Question 10

Should this be my only backup, or do I still need more than one copy?

Accepted Answer

Treat a single storage server, however large or well protected with RAID, as one copy of your data rather than your entire backup strategy. RAID protects you against a drive failing inside that one machine; it does nothing if the whole server becomes unreachable, if a backup job silently fails for weeks before anyone notices, or if something deletes the wrong files at the source and that deletion quietly syncs across. The rule of thumb backup practitioners generally lean on is the 3-2-1 approach: keep at least three copies of anything that matters, on two different types of storage, with at least one copy offsite from your primary systems. A dedicated storage server like this is a strong candidate for that offsite copy — separate hardware, separate location, full control over retention — but it works best as one leg of that setup rather than the only one you have.

Question 11

Can I use one of these servers as a NAS replacement for my team?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and that's one of the more common uses for the Standard and Pro Storage tiers specifically. An office NAS is convenient right up until you outgrow its drive bays, want offsite redundancy, or need more bandwidth than a small NAS box can realistically push. Because these are full dedicated servers with root access, you can run standard NAS or file-sharing software on top, configure user shares and permissions the way you would on a physical NAS, and get enterprise drives, ECC memory and a RAID controller you fully control, without being limited to whatever bays happen to fit inside a desktop NAS chassis. The main practical difference from an in-office NAS is that it lives in our India datacentre rather than a cupboard under a desk — an upside for offsite redundancy, and a consideration if your team needs very low-latency local file access instead.

Question 12

What happens if a drive fails? Do I need to source a replacement myself?

Accepted Answer

No, drive replacement is handled on our side as part of running the server — that's part of what you're paying for compared with buying and colocating your own hardware. If you're self-managed, you'll typically notice a failing drive through your RAID controller's monitoring or your own health checks and raise it with us to swap the physical disk; the array keeps serving data from the remaining drives the whole time, which is the point of running RAID rather than a single disk. If you're on the managed add-on, our team is already watching drive health as part of that service and can often catch a failing drive before it turns into an actual failure. Either way, you shouldn't need to buy replacement drives yourself or have physical access to the datacentre.

Question 13

Can I start on a smaller plan and move up as my storage needs grow?

Accepted Answer

Generally yes, and growth is fairly normal for anything storage-related — client backups accumulate, media libraries grow, application data rarely shrinks on its own. If you start on Essential or Value Storage and outgrow it, moving up to Standard, Pro Storage or one of the Elite tiers is a configuration change within the same storage-server category rather than switching to a different product, so you get more drives, more RAM and more bandwidth as you step up. The actual migration work is copying data across and repointing whatever points at the old server, which is a lot easier if you plan for it rather than waiting until you're already out of space. If you can see rapid growth coming, it's often simpler to size one tier above your current need up front instead of migrating twice within a year.

Question 14

What's the difference between the Elite SDS and Elite STOR tiers?

Accepted Answer

Both are our largest configurations, but they're built for different shapes of workload. The Elite SDS tiers run six NVMe drives at 7.68 TB each, so the emphasis is speed and low latency across a still-substantial capacity, useful for something like a distributed storage layer or a database-adjacent workload that happens to need a lot of fast disk behind it. The Elite STOR tiers flip that priority: a small SSD footprint handles the OS and caching, paired with room for dozens of high-capacity HDDs — up to 36 drives at 22 TB each on Elite STOR 1, and up to 102 drives at 14 TB each on Elite STOR 2. That's built for raw archival capacity rather than raw speed, the kind of server that ends up holding a genuinely large backup catalogue or media archive where total terabytes matter more than shaving microseconds off latency.

Question 15

Does a storage server need as much bandwidth as a compute-focused dedicated server?

Accepted Answer

It depends more on how the server gets used day to day than on it being a storage server specifically. One mostly holding cold backups that get written once and rarely read barely touches its bandwidth allocation on an average day. One serving active media files, handling frequent restores, or replicating data to or from another location will use considerably more of it. That's part of why bandwidth scales across this range, from 500 Mbps on Essential Storage up to 10 Gbps on the Elite tiers, so you can match it to whether this server is a quiet archive or something with constant read and write traffic. If you're unsure, it's worth thinking through how often data actually moves in and out, rather than just how much sits on the drives at rest.

Question 16

Is my data encrypted at rest on these servers?

Accepted Answer

Encryption is something you control at the OS level rather than something applied invisibly for you, because every plan here comes with full root access. You can set up full-disk encryption, encrypt specific volumes that hold sensitive client data, or handle it within your backup software itself, whichever fits how you're already managing keys and access elsewhere in your setup. If you'd rather not own that piece yourself, it's one of the things our managed add-on can configure and maintain as part of onboarding, alongside the RAID and backup-job setup covered above.

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