PostgreSQL Stand-Alone

Description

Good news for your development team: With "PostgreSQL - Stand Alone," we offer a fully managed, dedicated, and highly flexible solution for your application, hosted in ISO 27001-certified data centers. This allows your developers to focus entirely on the ongoing development of your application. PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source object-relational database system that has been actively developed and improved for over 30 years. It has earned a strong reputation for reliability, operational stability, and performance. We use the original software from the PostgreSQL Global Development Group for core functionality. We install and operate your database servers, ensuring optimal configuration in coordination with connected systems. Our monitoring service keeps a close watch on the service and proactively alerts us to issues such as system overload or potential data loss. We optimize cache sizes to deliver that extra boost in speed. Databases and their integration can be complex topics depending on your specific requirements. If you are unsure which of our options best suits your application, please feel free to contact our consulting team. Our experts will assist you in meeting your performance, availability, and resilience requirements. Full database backups are performed daily and separately from the Managed Cloud Instance backups. Our solution ensures consistent database backups. If a replica is present, the backup is created from it, ensuring the primary instance's performance remains unaffected. Retention periods are 7 days, 4 weeks, and 3 months. What we aim to achieve with this service:

High-performance and reliable database services
High configuration flexibility
Data storage in ISO 27001-certified data centers
Reduced workload for your development team

What you can expect from our service

Consistent daily database backups
Scalable architecture
Monitoring of all relevant health and performance metrics
Up to 100 GB of storage space for your database
A privileged user account for managing users and databases
Intelligent auto-configuration following any change to vCPU or RAM
Point-in-time recovery of a replica instance to the time of the last daily database backup

Optional service features

Additional database instances
More than 100 GB of secondary storage space

Service requests

Service restart
Scale performance
Simple configuration change
Stop service or uninstall
Set up user
Set up database
Point-in-time recovery
Enable built-in plugins
Disable built-in plugins

Standard Configurations

We offer two distinct standard hosting solutions that differ in performance and availability. Database content—such as data, schemas, and indexes—is imported by the customer. If these options do not meet your requirements, or if you would like assistance with the setup, please contact our consulting team to develop a solution tailored to your specific needs.

Single-Server Setup

This option is particularly suitable for development and testing systems, as it offers excellent value for money. Only a single database service is installed and operated as the primary instance, handling both read and write operations. Adding a replica at a later stage is generally straightforward. However, the primary instance will experience a temporary increase in load while the initial backup is created to establish replication to the replica. Backups are performed during live operation and may impact service performance.

Primary/Replica Setup (Our Best Practice)

For production environments, we recommend a primary/replica setup that allows read and write operations to be handled separately. All write operations are directed to the primary instance, while a significant portion of read operations is handled by the replica (provided your client application supports this). This distributes the read load across multiple instances, resulting in higher performance. Read performance can be scaled without interruption by adding further replicas; if a primary instance fails, we ensure that a replica takes over the primary's duties. As a preventive measure, we always include replicas with an identical configuration unless expressly agreed otherwise. This is a requirement for the Premium SLA. All replicas synchronize automatically with the primary instance. We continuously monitors the time lag between changes on the primary and the replicas, taking action if a specific threshold is exceeded. The database backup is created by the replica, reducing the load on the primary instance. We offer an optional "SLA Premium" for this configuration.

Our trending tool gives you access to historical data, such as:

Number of server processes
Number of "committed" and "rolled back" transactions
Process types and counts (running/sleeping/zombie) allowing you to monitor and optimize your client application's use of the database servers.

External Access

The database is configured to allow requests from the public internet. By default, all access is blocked and is only enabled in consultation with you, upon provision of usernames and IP addresses.

Optional Features/Configurations

Distributing the DB Setup Across Multiple Availability Zones

Except for the single-server setup, any setup variant can be distributed across multiple availability zones. This ensures the service remains available—or can be quickly restored—even if a complete data center failure occurs.

Managed Cloud Instance Sizes

Upon request, we would be happy to provide a quote for larger or smaller managed cloud instances tailored to your performance requirements. High-performance storage options are also available.

Discounts for Non-Production Servers

Many customers also host their development (DEV) and test (STAGE) systems with us. Since these systems typically have lower performance and availability requirements than production systems, we can use the underlying hardware with higher density. Scheduling maintenance tasks—such as reboots or migrations—is less complex. This allows us to offer a discount for staging and development systems. Should you wish to switch such an environment to production-grade infrastructure, we can arrange this upon request; however, the discount specified in your hosting contract would no longer apply. Please contact our sales team if you have any questions, and refer to the relevant sections of your SLA for these systems.

FAQ

Can the primary and replica instances be located in different availability zones?

Yes, that is possible.

What happens if the database runs out of disk space?

Our alerting system triggers an alarm as disk space approaches its limit. While we attempt to increase storage capacity temporarily in the short term, it remains your responsibility to stay within the disk space limits. Please contact our Service Management team to receive a custom quote for servers requiring more than 100 GB of storage on a permanent basis.

Can the primary and replica fail simultaneously?

We distribute the primary and replica across separate hardware to achieve greater component redundancy.

Is there a drop in performance during database backups?

The specific impact depends on the chosen setup. In a primary/replica configuration, only the replica's performance is affected.

Important Information

We offer PostgreSQL as a managed service. You can find further information and details about our managed services on our website.