If you've received a warning or had any issues with I/O related to your VPS, you may need to reduce your constant/bursted disk I/O usage or purchase the High I/O addon from your service page using the "Addons" button.
Disk I/O stands for disk input and output operations, this means reads and writes to the disk. It does not have to do with the actual disk space on your server, which you are entitled to use all of if you need to. Applications that cache data or log constantly to the disk may use a lot of disk I/O.
The problem is that since the disk is shared between customers and IOPS (I/O Operations) are limited per-node, it causes performance issues if customers use more than the allowed limits which are;
High I/O: Customer’s Service cannot average more than 80 IOPS within any two (2) hour period, cannot burst above 300MB/s disk write average for more than ten (10) minutes, cannot average more than 300 write operations per second for more than 1 hour, and cannot be above 20% average utilization within any six (6) hour period.
How to reduce it is highly dependent on what you're actually running, but generally, any reductions in the number of times your application "touches" the disk will reduce I/O. As an example, if you have an application that is syncing data between two locations, you can change your application's settings to do it a reduced rate.
If you're unsure what application is using your disk, then it is possible to figure out using an application called Resource Monitor. It is pre-installed on all of our Windows Servers and can be found by searching the start menu.
In that application, there is a Disk tab and a "Processes with Disk Activity" table. If you sort that by Total (B/sec) you can find the application that is using the most disk I/O. Keep in mind that this application doesn't show IOPS but it is good for finding the application using the most I/O so you know what to reduce.
If you have any other questions, please contact us via our ticketing system or via live chat.
