Why all our VPS services include High Availability protection against hardware failure

30 Apr 2026, by Micron21

When you're looking to evaluate the options between different Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers, it can be surprisingly hard to know what to actually compare.  In a lot of cases, there's very little information provided on the details that you actually need in order to make a proper and objective comparison.  For example, one CPU core is not equivalent to one CPU core on an entirely different architecture. The same is true for the speed and generation of RAM, as well as the type and brand of SSD storage.  Unfortunately this kind of limited information is still often displayed in the abstract - making out as if such an inclusion of a quoted vCPU count or RAM allocation will somehow provide you with a meaningful measure of the performance that you'd be getting with that service.

Unfortunately, this lack of information isn't just happening on the performance side of things - it's also happening on the reliability side.  This is because it's often impossible to tell how reliable your VPS service truly is outside of whatever uptime information the provider has chosen to share with you.  What hardware is your VM (Virtual Machine) actually running on?  How old is the host, the CPU, the RAM, and even the storage unit itself?  What protection exists for the data stored on the system?  Is it protected via a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks - is the practice of combining multiple physical drives into a single logical unit so that data is duplicated and protected against drive failure)?  Or is there no protection at all?   Is the VM hosted on a single server, or is it hosted on a cluster designed to protect you against all hardware-related downtime?  Knowing exactly what to ask and having honest answers to such questions helps equip you to make the right informed decision when it comes to choosing VPS providers.

That's why, in this month’s article we'll be focusing on our VPS offering.  We'll be covering the added lengths that we go to for ensuring that your services remain online - even if things go wrong at the underlying hardware level!  Primary amongst these measures, we'll discuss High Availability (HA) protection.  Specifically, we'll explain why its inclusion is so important - so much so that we've implemented High Availability (HA) protection into all of our VPS services, starting right from our basic plan!

What protections exist with most standard VPS plans?

Before we can talk about what protections we've put in place, it's important to first take a look at what is standard in the industry.

The typical VPS configuration with most providers looks something like this:

• A single physical server, also known as the host, running a hypervisor such as KVM, Xen, VMware, or Hyper-V.
• Multiple customer VMs running side-by-side on that single host, each isolated from the others.
• Local storage attached directly to that host, often configured in some form of RAID for drive-level redundancy.
• Possibly a backup process that runs on a regular schedule, copying data to a separate location for recovery purposes.

This is a perfectly serviceable configuration, and it's what powers the majority of the budget VPS market.  However, in the name of trying to provide services as cheaply as possible, many providers will cut corners on the redundancy that genuinely keeps you online.  They don't run multiple servers for redundancy, they may skimp on the RAID configuration and choose options that aren't as reliable as they could be (e.g. RAID 0 striping with no redundancy, or RAID 5 instead of RAID 10), and they may even utilise older or cheaper hardware to push their costs down even further!

The problem with this approach is straightforward.  These measures help the provider hit a lower price point, however this comes at the cost of reliability for you.  If the host's CPU fails, every VM running on that server will be offline, including yours!  If the RAM fails, the same applies.  If the storage fails in a way that exceeds what the RAID is able to recover from, you're now facing an outage that could last hours or days whilst data being is restored from backup.  And worse, throughout all of this stress, you have very little visibility or control over how quickly things get resolved!

And worse still, even when the hardware is tracking along fine, simple maintenance situations such as replacing a faulty stick of RAM or upgrading a host's firmware, will often require taking the whole server offline.  This means that if your VPS happens to reside on that host, then your service will also go down for that duration!

What we've chosen to do differently - High Availability across the board

Rather than accepting these limitations as the cost of doing business, we've taken a different approach with our VPS services.  As our long-time readers will know, every single one of our VPS services running on our mCloud platform includes High Availability (HA) protection as a standard - starting right from our basic plan!

So what does this actually mean?  High Availability, often abbreviated to HA, refers to the practice of designing systems so that they remain online even when individual components fail.  It does this through "redundancy" - which in this industry and context, is a positive word.  Critical components are duplicated, and when a failure is detected, traffic and workloads automatically shift across to the remaining healthy components without manual intervention.  We've covered this concept in more depth in our The Importance of High Availability for Mission Critical Workloads article from awhile back.

In our case, mCloud delivers HA through two complementary platforms - mCompute for the compute side, and mSAN for storage.  Both are built on industry-leading open-source technologies, namely OpenStack and Ceph respectively, which were chosen specifically because they're designed from the ground up with this kind of resilience in mind.

On the compute side, mCompute runs as a cluster of physical hosts rather than a single server.  If one of those hosts experiences a hardware failure, such as a CPU fault, a RAM failure, or even a complete power loss to that node, the affected VMs are automatically restarted on a different host within the cluster.  There's no manual intervention required, and the time taken to recover is usually measured in seconds to a couple of minutes, rather than hours!

On the storage side, mSAN is built on Ceph and uses what's known as 3N replication.  This means that every block of data written to your VM's storage is automatically replicated at least three times across separate physical storage nodes.  If any one storage node fails, your data is still available on the other copies, and Ceph automatically begins re-replicating the data to a new node to restore the full level of redundancy.  From the perspective of your VM, the failure is essentially invisible!

Bringing it all back to the customer experience, this is what HA actually delivers.  With other providers, a CPU, RAM, or storage failure on a host can result in extended downtime for your workloads, often with no concrete guarantees on how long it will be before your systems are back online.  With Micron21, those same kinds of failures don't affect the availability of your services.  Your workloads automatically rebalance across the cluster of servers - so getting back online happens almost immediately!

It must be said, this approach does mean that our pricing isn't the lowest out there. Building and maintaining a clustered HA platform costs significantly more than simply running individual standalone hosts, and this cost needs to be reflected somewhere. We may potentially miss out on those customers who would prefer the absolute cheapest price out there above all else. However, we strongly believe in High Availability protection and that the slight trade-off cost for having it included as part of all our VPS services is well worth having.  This is because reliability is one of those things that's easy to overlook and undervalue - right up until that moment it hits you that you need it - at which point the cost of an outage to you will often dwarf whatever money you thought you'd be saving by going with the cheapest option.

Another benefit - Geographic High Availability via a single click

Not only do all of our VPS services come with HA included as standard, but one of the more unique features of our mCloud platform is the ability to extend that protection across multiple geographic locations with no reconfiguration required from our customers.  It's simply an option that you can select when signing up.  Once enabled, your service is provisioned to span across three geographically separated locations, rather than just one.

This feature is known as Geographic High Availability (GeoHA), and it goes a step beyond standard High Availablity (HA).  Standard HA, as we've been covering above, protects you against hardware failure within a single data centre.  GeoHA, on the other hand, has teh added benefit of also protecting you against issues that could affect an entire site, such as a localised power event, a connectivity issue affecting the data centre's upstream providers, a natural disaster, or even physical damage to the building itself.

Behind the scenes, this is made possible by our mSAN Geo Diverse NVMe storage cluster, which spans three of our Melbourne data centre locations.  Data written to your VM is replicated in real-time across all three sites via a 100 Gbps dark fibre backbone, ensuring that a complete site loss anywhere along that chain doesn't result in data loss or extended downtime.

Traditionally, this kind of multi-site protection has been the reserve of enterprise customers willing to invest very serious money.  Setting it up yourself usually requires duplicated systems running in parallel across multiple sites, dedicated load balancers to direct traffic between them, replication tooling, monitoring, and the engineering hours required to design and operate it all.  These costs can all add up pretty quickly, and for many organisations the price tag has historically been prohibitive.

With Micron21, the additional cost on top of the VPS itself, typically works out to be around 25-30%.  Given the level of reliability and peace-of-mind that businesses gain, particularly for production workloads, customer-facing services, or anything that's generating revenue, this decision to go GeoHA makes for an obvious and easy one for them to make.  

Bringing it all together

When you're shopping around between VPS providers, it's worth looking past the surface-level specifications.  A vCPU count and a RAM allocation tell you almost nothing about how reliable a service will be, or what happens when the hardware underneath your VM eventually fails.  Hardware always fails eventually - it's not a question of if, but when!

Most standard VPS services, in trying to hit the lowest possible price point, run on single hosts with locally attached storage and minimal redundancy.  This is perfectly fine for some workloads, particularly development environments, low-impact non-production services, or anything where occasional downtime is acceptable.  However, for anything that genuinely matters to your business, then this level of protection simply isn't enough.

That's why we've chosen to include High Availability (HA) protection across our entire VPS range, from our smallest plans right through to our largest.  Every VPS runs on our clustered mCloud platform, with mCompute providing automatic compute failover and mSAN providing 3N replicated storage.  For workloads that need the highest possible level of resilience, GeoHA can be enabled with a single click at sign-up, extending that same protection across three separate Melbourne data centres for a relatively modest additional cost.

Reliability isn't a feature that should be reserved for the most expensive plans.  We believe that everyone deserves to have their services stay online, regardless of what they're paying.

Have any questions about our VPS services or High Availability?

VPS services are the next step above our entry-level Shared Web Hosting (SWH) plans.  If you're currently are on a SWH plan and feel that you need that added control over your hosting environment, or just want that reliability and peace-of-mind that comes with services being protected by High Availability (HA) - then our VPS services is where to start looking.  Worth mentioning here too is that anyone hosting their own VPS with us gets a free initial vulnerability scan. 

If you have any questions about our VPS services, our mCloud platform, or how Geographic High Availability (GeoHA) could fit into your environment, just let us know!  We're always happy to have a no-obligation chat about your requirements and recommend the right configuration for your business and workloads. 

You can call us on 1300 769 972 (Option #1) or reach us via email at sales@micron21.com.