Choosing the Best Storage Offering for your Cloud

When you setup a Cloud Enterprise account with Hosting.com, you will notice that you have two options available; SATA and Fiber Channel Array. While both will provide you with RAID10 redundancy (currently some datacenters only provide RAID5 for the SATA offering, but we are in the process of upgrading those to RAID10), it is important for you to choose the offering that better suits your needs.

• SATA is the default storage option and is normally the perferred option.
• Fiber Channel Array (or FC) is better suited for high transaction of dheavy hosting solutions that require a high amount of I/O access.

If you are not sure on which to select, you can look at what you plan on hosting on the server to decide on which offering you will need. A good rule of thumb is, if you plan on running databases (MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle) and will be using a high number of transactions, then the Fiber Channel Array would be better suited due to the amount of traffic that is provided.

On the other hand, if you plan on hosting several websites but they are not database heavy and are running PHP, HTML or ASP, it may be in your interest to choose the SATA offering.

Keep in mind that at any time you can choose to upgrade or downgrade from the SATA or Fiber Channel Arrays, by making the change in the Hosting.com Customer Portal.

Should you have any questions about which offering is best for you, please contact our Cloud Support team and they will be able to answer your questions.