Storage Servers Overview

Storage servers are bare-metal machines built around very large disk capacity rather than raw compute, with no egress fees on the data you pull back out. This guide covers the three tiers, what they are good for, how they are ordered and delivered, and how they differ from ordinary server disk.

What a Storage Server Is

A storage server is a dedicated physical machine whose shape is deliberately lopsided: a modest CPU, a lot of RAM, and an enormous amount of disk. It exists for workloads where capacity is the constraint and compute is not.

Typical uses:

• Backup targets. A single destination that holds months of backups from many other machines.
• Media libraries. Video, imagery, and raw assets that are too large to keep on an application server.
• Archives and cold data. Records you must retain, rarely read, and cannot afford to store on premium storage.
• Data sets. Training corpora, logs, and analytics dumps that you want next to your own compute rather than behind a metered API.

Like every bare-metal product, the whole machine is yours. Nobody else is reading or writing those disks.

The Three Tiers

Shelf is the entry point and is already far larger than any cloud server disk. Trench roughly triples it. Abyss is the top of the range.

Every tier is sold both unmanaged and managed. Unmanaged gives you root and leaves the operating system to you. Managed keeps the same hardware with our engineers looking after the software layer. See Managed vs Unmanaged Cloud Servers, which draws the same line.

For live pricing in your own currency, open Store in KPanel, then the Dedicated Servers card, and switch to the Storage tab.

No Egress Fees

Storage servers carry no egress fees. Data you read back out of the machine is not metered and not charged per gigabyte.

That is worth being precise about, because it is the single biggest difference from object storage services that price cheaply per stored gigabyte and then charge for every byte you retrieve. If your data is written once and read rarely, that pricing model is fine. If you actually read your archive, restore from it, or serve media out of it, egress fees are where the bill comes from, and a storage server removes that variable entirely.

The Traffic card on the server's Manage page graphs inbound and outbound volume so you can see what you are moving. Those figures are for your own monitoring, not a bill.

Setup Fee and Billing

Storage servers carry a one-time setup fee on top of the monthly price, the same as dedicated and GPU servers, because a physical machine is built for you. Cloud servers, ARM, Standard, and Dedicated vCPU, carry no setup fee.

Both amounts are shown separately at checkout before you pay: the setup fee once, the plan price monthly.

Ordering a Storage Server

1. Sign in to KPanel.
2. Click Store in the left sidebar.
3. Under Servers, click the Dedicated Servers card.
4. Switch to the Storage tab.
5. Choose Unmanaged or Managed, pick a tier, and complete checkout.

Storage servers are built to order, not provisioned instantly. After checkout you get an acknowledgement email and the order appears in your account with a provisioning tracker. The full walkthrough, including what each tracker stage means, is in Ordering a Dedicated Server.

Where Storage Servers Appear in KPanel

Storage servers are delivered on the same path as dedicated servers, so they show up in the same place:

1. Click Dedicated Servers in the left sidebar.
2. Your storage server is in the list alongside any dedicated machines.
3. Click it, or its Manage link, to open it.

There is no separate Storage Servers item in the sidebar. If you have just ordered one and cannot find it, look under Dedicated Servers.

Managing a Storage Server

The whole hardware toolset applies, and it is documented in Managing a Dedicated Server:

• Power: graceful restart, hardware reset, forced power cycle, and Wake-on-LAN.
• Rescue system: a temporary Linux environment, or a browser-based virtual console, for a machine that will not boot.
• Reverse DNS: PTR records for every routed IP.
• IPs and subnets: what is routed to the machine, plus ordering an additional IPv4 address.
• Traffic: inbound and outbound volume by day, month, or year.
• Firewall: an upstream filter that drops traffic before it reaches the machine.
• Advanced: a full operating system reinstall, behind a typed confirmation.

Console access, when SSH is not enough, is covered in Dedicated Server Console Access.

Setting the Machine Up Well

A few things are worth deciding before you start filling the disks.

Plan your filesystem layout first. Reorganising 200 TB after the fact is painful. Decide up front how the array is assembled and where each class of data lives.

Lock the machine down. A storage server usually needs a small number of clients and nothing else. Use the upstream firewall on the Manage page to allow only the sources that must reach it, and keep Allow platform services switched on so you do not lock yourself out.

Encrypt anything sensitive. Single tenancy means nobody else is on the machine, but it does not encrypt your data for you.

Do not treat it as your only copy. A storage server is one machine in one location. If it holds your only copy of something you cannot lose, you do not have a backup, you have a single point of failure. Keep a second copy somewhere else.

Storage Server or Something Else?

If you need a few hundred gigabytes rather than tens of terabytes, a cloud server with added storage is cheaper and provisions in a minute. See Cloud Server Storage and Cloud Servers Overview.

If you need compute rather than capacity, look at the dedicated range in Dedicated Servers Overview, or the accelerated range in GPU Servers Overview.

For anything else, including current availability, contact us from Support in KPanel or email support@kapsulehost.com.