Written by m4dz

Hardware is always evolving, and we’re committed to providing our customers with the best quality possible from their Hosting Provider. alwaysdata is both a Cloud Provider — with our Shared Plans — and a PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider.

This latter service allows you access to dedicated environments, built to fit your needs, and provisioned with our platform. They constitute the most advanced platform to power your apps and services on the Web.

This month, we renewed our hardware offer dedicated to our Private PaaS. Our tasty menu: new CPUs and NVMe SSDs!

At Lightning Speed!

alwaysdata has used SSDs (Solid State Drives) in all of our servers for a while now. This technology was one of the biggest breakthroughs in computer hardware in the last decade. By replacing the older mechanical disks with new non-volatile memory for storage, we removed a large bottleneck in our architecture, allowing us to load and run our applications blazingly fast!

At first SSDs came with SATA III support, the de facto standard used to connect disks. Unfortunately, and despite its quality, we rapidly reached the speed limit of SATA technology. Over the last few years, a new standard has emerged: NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory express), dedicated to SSDs that transfers data to and from disks at their native memory access speed.

So we’ve updated our PaaS server configurations to NVMe! This is now the default standard for our disks available for your new environments in Private PaaS. As well as increased disk speed connections, these configurations give you access to up to 8TB in RAID1 for your local regular storage.

We’ve also updated the Virtual PaaS configurations: new VPS will now get access to an increased disks space.

Processing for the Best

Migrating to NVMe was a mandatory move for us. But maintaining a homogeneous hardware architecture isn’t an easy task. To keep our structure consistent with our hardware provider, we had to rethink a few of our components. Fortunately, this was for the best!

With this hardware configuration update, we also migrated from Intel to AMD for our CPUs. Bye-bye Xeon, hello EPYC! The most notable change is a global performance enhancement for a fair price.

From our customer’s point of view, this new architecture lets you run more CPU cores if needed for a similar price, and allows for CPU upgrades without also upgrading the motherboard thanks to a common socket shared by all AMD CPUs. This enables us to upgrade your configurations to fit your needs without having to upgrade the motherboard too!

Last but not least, AMD CPU architectures know how to deal with CVEs without suffering performance issues. This means a more secure architecture, at the same high speeds you’ve come to expect!

A Design on Steroids!

Our configuration tool still allows you to build your own custom designs, and our new offers are already available! It lets you configure a well-fitted machine’s network, with servers handling:

• from 8 to 64 CPUs cores
• from 16 GB to 128 GB RAM
• up to 8 TB of local storage on NVMe disks

Let’s build yours!

Always the Fair Price

As mentioned above, we’re committed to providing you with the best hardware we can. But this doesn’t mean we should charge more for it! Our Private PaaS configurations have evolved, but the price range remains the same! For a similar price, you’ve got access to all this improved hardware, right now!

If you’re planning to stay with us for a while, choose our annual plans and save up to 15% on the global price too! Moreover alwaysdata never freezes you on your hardware: if you want to take advantage of our new architectures, simply ask for a migration!