What is persistent storage?
Persistent storage is disk space that survives restarts, redeploys and crashes. Files written there are still present afterwards. The opposite is ephemeral storage, where the filesystem is recreated on every deploy, so uploads, SQLite databases and generated files silently disappear.
What breaks without persistent storage?
Anything that writes to disk and expects to read it back. User uploads vanish on the next deploy. A SQLite database resets to empty. Generated thumbnails, session files, search indexes and log archives all disappear. The failure is quiet: everything works in testing and the data is gone after the next release.
- User uploads: avatars, attachments, exported files.
- SQLite databases, which many self-hosted apps use by default.
- Encryption keys and credential stores written on first run.
- Caches and search indexes that are expensive to rebuild.
Every InstaPods pod includes persistent disk, from 10 GB on the $3/mo Launch plan to 150 GB on the $49/mo Turbo plan. Source: InstaPods plan table, verified 2026-08-06
Is a database the same as persistent storage?
No, they solve different halves of the problem. A managed database persists structured records. Persistent disk persists files. Most apps need both: rows in PostgreSQL and the uploaded PDF on disk. On InstaPods the disk is part of the pod, and PostgreSQL, MySQL or Redis are add-on services from the Build plan at $7/mo.
How do you check whether a host gives you persistent disk?
Write a file, redeploy, then look for it. If it is gone, the filesystem is ephemeral. The documentation phrasing to watch for is "the filesystem is reset on each deploy" or "use an external object store for uploads", which is a polite way of saying your disk does not survive.
Where persistent storage shows up on InstaPods
Related terms
Try it on a real server
InstaPods gives you a pod with SSH access, automatic HTTPS and persistent disk from $3/mo. One command from your project folder.
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