A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules so as to save data. The SSDs remain relatively new and more pricey compared to classic hard disk drives (HDD), however they are faster, so they are frequently used for Operating Systems and apps on both home PCs and servers. An SSD is recommended as it doesn't have spinning disks which restrict its speed and may even cause overheating like it may happen with an HDD. Most companies use SSDs for caching purposes, so any website content which is accessed more frequently will be held on this kind of drives, while all the other content will be stored on regular HDDs. The reason to use this type of a configuration is to balance the cost and performance of their website hosting platform and to minimize the load on the HDDs resulting from countless reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Web Hosting
The cloud platform where we create shared web hosting accounts uses exclusively SSD drives, so your web applications and static Internet sites will open very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, emails and databases, so no matter if you load a page or check for new email messages using webmail, the content will load immediately. To ensure even better speeds, we also use numerous dedicated SSDs that function only as cache. All of the content that generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later read from them and not from the main storage drives. Of course, that content is replaced dynamically for improved efficiency. What we achieve in this way apart from the improved speed is reduced overall load, thus reduced possibility of hardware failures, and prolonged lifespan of the primary drives, that is one more level of security for any information that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Servers
All semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer are generated on a cloud platform that uses only SSD drives. We do not use HDDs any longer, so your websites will load extremely fast since we employ SSDs for each part of the service - files, databases and e-mails. Considering that some people may host sites that are more popular than others, we also use numerous drives for caching. Our system detects any content that is accessed more frequently and duplicates it on these drives in order to load it from them. This configuration is used for load-balancing purposes as we guarantee that several reading/writing intensive websites will not affect the performance of the other Internet sites which are stored on the same main drive. Using caching drives also increases the lifespan of the main storage SSDs and reduces the probability of disk failures.