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Not a huge company like DO, but iwStack [1] provides a SAN backed cloud, with selectable KVM/XEN instances, custom ISO and virtual network support. The prices are similar to DO. [1] http://iwstack.com/

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That's pretty damn interesting for more traditional hosting type usage.

Seems like they sell 50 GB of real SAN backed storage for just 3.6€ per month.

How can they afford to be so cheap?

That's not even particularly cheap per-GB - BuyVM ( http://buyvm.net/storage-vps/ ) will sell you 250GB for 7USD/mo.

Disclaimer: happy customer

> That's not even particularly cheap per-GB - BuyVM ( http://buyvm.net/storage-vps/ ) will sell you 250GB for 7USD/mo.

Except that is not SAN backed storage.

From the website:

> We only use RAID-60 drive arrays with a minimum of 16 drives

That's somewhat scary. RAID-6 might be almost ok, but striped? No thank you. I bet they don't also have block level checksums.

I think one of the reasons is that they only have a small number of datacenters, have a small number of (very friendly) staff and are not going after the mass market like DO, and I guess they don't spend anything on marketing.

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