VPS in the United Kingdom for data storage

VPS Hosting in the United Kingdom

London holds a special place on the map of the internet: it's the point where European networks meet transatlantic routes to the US. Most submarine cables crossing the Atlantic land here, which is why both Europe and the US East Coast are equally fast to reach from London. Virtual servers here run on the same VMware vSphere platform as the rest of our locations: a new server deploys within minutes, and resources can be adjusted without moving to different hardware.

The UK site is the newest in our network, and we designed it from a clean slate, drawing on all the experience we've accumulated since 2007. Every decision — from hardware selection and network topology to redundancy schemes — was made based on what we've learned from years of running our other locations. The result is a site we're genuinely proud of.

Why Choose a VPS in the United Kingdom

First, unique geography. If your project serves both European and American audiences, London is the best single location: latency to major Western European cities is comparable to intra-European levels, while latency to New York is noticeably lower than from Frankfurt or Amsterdam, thanks to direct transatlantic routes. For SaaS services, APIs, and projects with distributed audiences, this removes the need to maintain two servers on opposite sides of the ocean.

Second, the network. London is home to LINX, one of the oldest and largest internet exchange points in the world. Routes to British and international operators stay short and predictable, which directly translates into stable service response times.

Third, the market and jurisdiction. The UK is Europe's largest English-speaking economy with its own data protection legislation (UK GDPR). For projects targeting British clients, local hosting delivers both minimal latency and compliance with local requirements — after Brexit, that's a separate box that a server in the EU no longer ticks.

And then there's cloud flexibility: vCPU, RAM, and disk space can be scaled on demand, with no hardware procurement or lengthy migrations. Handy during seasonal peaks, new service launches, or active development.

VMware Cloud Platform

As in our other locations, the cloud in London is built on VMware vSphere — an enterprise virtualization platform, not a free hypervisor. The difference shows in critical moments: if a physical node fails, the HA cluster automatically restarts virtual machines on healthy servers, and planned maintenance is handled via live migration — the VPS moves between nodes without service interruption.

The storage layer is built on latest-generation SSD and NVMe — when deploying the new site, we equipped it with the most modern hardware available. In practice, this means fast OS boot times, responsive databases, smooth handling of CI/CD and container environments. There's enough headroom not just for standard web hosting, but also for high-traffic web projects, business applications, and multi-tenant SaaS services.

About the ServerChoice Data Center

Servers are housed in the ServerChoice data center, a TIER III+ facility in London. Power, cooling, and network infrastructure are redundant, the facility is monitored around the clock, and physical access is controlled at multiple levels with video surveillance.

The site's location is an advantage in its own right: proximity to London's key telecom hubs and the LINX exchange simplifies circuit provisioning and provides short routes both across the UK and internationally.

XServer Cloud has been in business since 2007, and the London site is the newest addition to our network, designed with all of that accumulated experience in mind. If your project needs a point between Europe and the US with first-class connectivity in both directions — spin up a VPS in London and see for yourself.

VPS for Data Storage

A regular VPS runs into a simple problem: space on fast SSD and NVMe drives is expensive, and storing hundreds of gigabytes of files there is like keeping your winter clothes in a safe. For workloads like these, we offer a dedicated solution — additional HDD storage, where a gigabyte costs several times less than on SSD. Attach a disk of whatever size you need and store as much as you want, without paying for speed where it isn't needed.

The recommended setup is simple: the operating system and applications live on fast SSD/NVMe — so the server boots and runs snappily — while bulk data sits on HDD. The best of both worlds at a sensible price.

What HDD Storage Is Good For

• Personal or corporate cloud — Nextcloud or Seafile on your own server: team files, sync, shared folders. Full control over your data instead of a Dropbox subscription with someone else's rules.
• Media libraries — photo and video archives, music collections, libraries for Plex or Jellyfin. Media files are read sequentially, and HDDs handle that beautifully.
• Backup target — a reliable destination for backups of other servers, workstations, or a NAS. A separate site in a different data center is the right strategy for storing copies.
• Archives and document storage — scans, reports, logs, old projects: everything that needs to be kept for years and opened occasionally.
• File sharing and distribution — serving updates, images, and large files to clients or employees.
• Application data — user uploads, attachments, exports: all the bulky data your service generates that doesn't need NVMe speeds.

Why It Beats the Alternatives

Cloud storage services charge monthly for every terabyte, plus separately for download traffic. Expanding SSD space on a regular VPS is costly. And a dedicated server with large disks is unjustifiably expensive compared to a virtual one. HDD storage on a VPS covers the middle ground: large capacity at a small price, unmetered traffic on a 100 Mbps port (upgradable to 1 Gbps), and full control over your data — your own server, your own file system, your own encryption if you want it.

How to Size the Configuration

Storage doesn't need heavy compute: file workloads get by with modest vCPU and memory, so most of the budget goes into the disks themselves. A few rules of thumb: Nextcloud for a handful of users runs fine on a minimal configuration with a couple hundred gigabytes of HDD; a media server like Plex benefits from extra vCPUs if you plan to transcode video on the fly; a backup target needs almost no compute at all — just space. Storage capacity can be expanded as it fills up — start with a realistic estimate rather than a "just in case" buffer.

When to Consider Other Configurations

If your data is a busy database handling thousands of queries per second, it needs fast disks and plenty of memory: look at High Performance. If the server is primarily for a website and files are secondary, start with a VPS for websites and add HDD in the configurator. And if you're keeping critical data in a single copy — enable daily backups: HDD storage protects your budget, but not against accidental deletion.

Build Your Storage

Pick your HDD size in the configurator — from 100 GB to 2 TB per server — and within minutes you'll have your own storage in a reliable data center. XServer Cloud — store a lot, pay a little.