21.08.2025
Ceph at the core: building resilient and scalable storage
Data is at the heart of everything we do, from web hosting and cloud platforms to customer tools and internal systems. That’s why many of our brands rely on Ceph, the open source storage system that delivers resilience, flexibility, and performance at scale.
Ceph provides a unified approach to storage (block, object, and file) allowing our engineering teams to build flexible, scalable platforms without relying on expensive proprietary systems. From VPS platforms to web hosting services and backups, Ceph helps power a wide range of offerings across the Your.Online group.
Why Ceph?
Ceph’s value lies in its architecture: self-healing, self-managing, and fully distributed. It enables our brands to build storage clusters that scale horizontally, recover automatically from failures, and support diverse workloads, all while maintaining complete operational control.
Unlike traditional SAN or NAS systems, Ceph is open source, vendor-neutral, and software-defined. This gives our companies the freedom to choose their hardware, manage costs, and adapt their infrastructure to specific business needs, whether serving tens of thousands of hosting users or powering backup systems.
The majority of our brands use either Supermicro or Dell servers with NVMe storage underneath their Ceph clusters. While some HDD-backed clusters still exist, they are mainly used for archival and backup storage.
A shared foundation, locally implemented
Across the Your.Online group, Ceph is used in a variety of ways, from high-performance block storage for virtualization, to object storage powering developer platforms and customer-facing APIs.
Each implementation is slightly different, tailored to local needs and business goals. But the core principles remain the same: build for scale, automate wherever possible, and prioritize resilience.
Block storage is the most common use case for Ceph at our brands. Often managed by an orchestrator such as Apache CloudStack or virtualization platform as Proxmox. A notable commonality is that the KVM hypervisor is used in most of our virtualization platforms.
Networking deployments also vary by business and deployment. Some use advanced routing techniques with BGP and IPv6 up until the host, others use traditional VLAN-based networks with IPv4 addressing. These deployment decisions are up to the engineers at each local business.
Learning from each other
Storage engineering is rarely plug-and-play. That’s why knowledge sharing is central to how we work. Within Your.Online, engineers regularly exchange tuning strategies, monitoring tools, recovery experiences, and upgrade insights.
This collaboration helps brands avoid pitfalls, accelerate improvements, and raise the bar on storage operations across the board. Our internal community, known as “Special Interest Groups,” enables engineers to connect with peers at other brands to discuss technical topics and challenges.
Built for the long term
Choosing Ceph reflects our broader philosophy: we build for the long term. Open source systems like Ceph give us the control and transparency to innovate at our own pace, without being locked into a single vendor.
By aligning on Ceph where it fits best, we create a storage backbone that is resilient, adaptable, and cost-effective, while preserving full autonomy at the local level.
We love open source and understand we need to give back to the community. That’s why our CTO, Wido den Hollander, frequently speaks at conferences about the power of Ceph.
Pizza and performance tuning?
Want to talk about scaling storage, explore how Ceph could fit your setup, or just geek out over distributed systems? Drop us a message, Wido or one of our storage engineers is always up for a deep dive. We’ll bring the diagrams. You bring the appetite; pizza is on us!