A solid-state drive (SSD) improves the performance of any application running on it compared with a regular hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that a solid-state drive works by using a variety of interconnected flash memory units, so there're no physical parts to move. In contrast, a hard-disk drive functions with spinning disks and each reading or writing process causes the disks to move, which means that the speed of an HDD is restricted. Since the cost of the two types of drives also differ, lots of personal computers and web servers are provided with an SSD for the operating system and various applications, and a hard disk for file storage, thus balancing cost and effectiveness. A website hosting provider may also use an SSD for caching purposes, thus files which are used on a regular basis will be saved on such a drive for reaching higher loading speeds and for reducing the reading/writing processes on the HDDs.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud platform where we make shared website hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web apps and static websites will load extremely fast. The SSDs are used for files, email addresses and databases, so regardless of whether you open a page or check for new emails through webmail, the content will load instantly. To ensure even better speeds, we also use multiple dedicated SSDs which work only as cache. All content which generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later on 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 decreased overall load, thus decreased probability of hardware failures, and extended lifespan of the main drives, that is one more level of security for any info that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you acquire one of our semi-dedicated hosting packages, your Internet sites will be stored on a cloud platform that employs exclusively SSD drives for the storage of files, databases and emails. In addition to the revolutionary ZFS file system that we use, this setup guarantees very fast loading speed for any web app hosted on our end. To ensure that the websites of one customer don't affect the ones of another one, we also use a number of SSDs as cache - our system detects files which are accessed more frequently and duplicates them, so that they start loading from the caching drives. The content on the latter is updated dynamically and for that reason we can balance the load on all of the drives, ensure their extended life-span, lower the risk of disk failures and, of course, offer you a super fast and reliable web hosting service.