We routinely get asked about using lock Block Storage through some of our native providers. At this moment, we don’t officially support it, but you can definitely add it manually and leverage some of the neat benefits that Block Storage provides.
You may need to adapt this on a provider by provider basis, but we’re using Digital Ocean as a template. One piece of advice we’d give, if you’re wanting to use this for sites, I’d recommend doing it on a brand new server that has no customer sites on it. The example below is for backups, but you could use the same process for web files or other things.
When you first create the Block Storage volume, DO would show something like:
# Create a mount point for your volume:
$ mkdir -p /mnt/volumename
# Mount your volume at the newly-created mount point:
$ mount -o discard,defaults,noatime /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_volumename /mnt/volumename
# Change fstab so the volume will be mounted after a reboot
$ echo '/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_volumename /mnt/volumename ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
From the above you’ll gain the real disk ID. Then you’d want to use the below commands. The below is an example of if you’d want to move our local backups over to block storage.
mv /opt/gridpane/backups /opt/gridpane/backups-alt
mkdir /opt/gridpane/backups
mount -o discard,defaults,noatime /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_volumename /opt/gridpane/backups
echo '/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-0DO_Volume_volumename /opt/gridpane/backups ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
cp -pr /opt/gridpane/backups-alt/* /opt/gridpane/backups/
If all looks good, do:
rm -r /opt/gridpane/backups-alt
All sites (WordPress core files) are stored at /var/www/site.url/htdocs . You could either move all of /var/www/ to block storage, or you could just move wp-content/uploads, or wherever the files you are wanting to move are. If you go super granular with this, you might have to add extra mounts to the same storage. You could also add multiple blocks. We’re not sure if Linode or DO has limits, but we are sure there is a limit somewhere down the road. We’d recommend probably no more than four volumes.
If you have questions about this guide, please feel free to post in the community forum.