DigitalOcean introduces block storage

I am a happy DigitalOcean customer. Almost all my stuff is running there now, I just have one Linode machine for comparison reasons. This blog is running on the smallest DigitalOcean droplet that is available. I'm using nginx proxy_cache for this, so a lot of load is taken from database and the node process.

For small websites with low to average traffic and a performant setup you can get away with ridiculously low costs. There was just one thing, that was slightly bothering me: if you had a lot of media, for example videos or audio files, you are quickly at the end of the included storage. I have a project with a very limited set of users and a low load, but it is very dependent on a lot of video and high-res photo assets – as this is the nature of this project.

My headache is at an end, the issue has finally been solved: Digital Ocean introduces Block Storage.

DO's Block storage is SSD based and – from what I read – just another volume that you can mount anywhere. The only thing I still wonder is whether you could use a volume as a common asset storage for a number of nodes. I suspect it won't work out of the box, but there might be solutions for this soon. It's not an uncommon use. Sadly, as it's not available in my region as of now, I couldn't try it yet.