Why VM’s on NVMe can be bad news for your performance
When a hosting company advertises “NVMe VPS,” they’re highlighting the use of fast NVMe SSD storage, but they’re not necessarily specifying where that storage is located. There are two main possibilities:
- Local NVMe – The NVMe drives are physically installed in the same server that runs your VPS. This provides the absolute best performance with minimal latency.
- SAN/Network NVMe – The NVMe drives are in a Storage Area Network (SAN) or network storage system that connects to your VPS server over the network. While still using fast NVMe technology, there’s added network latency between your VPS and the storage.
Many hosting providers use SAN/networked storage because it allows for easier management, better redundancy, and simpler migration between physical hosts. However, they rarely explicitly state this in their marketing materials, letting customers assume it’s local storage.
The performance difference can be significant for I/O-intensive workloads. Local NVMe might deliver 5-20μs latency, while networked NVMe could be 100-500μs or more depending on the implementation.
We want to be very clear: all our SSD (not NVMe) based VM’s use local storage unless specifically agreed with the client for special purposes 🙂