A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules so as to store information. The SSDs are still relatively new and more pricey compared to standard hard disk drives (HDD), but they're faster, so they are often used for Operating Systems and apps on both home PCs and hosting servers. An SSD is recommended as it doesn't have spinning disks which limit its speed and can cause overheating like it could happen with an HDD. A number of companies use SSDs for caching purposes, so all content which is accessed more frequently will be located on this kind of drives, while all the other content will be stored on regular HDDs. The reason to use this type of a setup is to balance the price and performance of their web hosting platform and to minimize the load on the HDDs resulting from countless reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Web Hosting
The cloud platform where we make web hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web apps and static websites will open very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, emails and databases, so no matter if you open a page or check for new e-mails through webmail, the content will load instantly. To offer even higher speeds, we also use numerous dedicated SSDs that work only as cache. Any content that generates a lot of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later on read from them and not from the main storage drives. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for improved efficiency. What we achieve that way in addition to the improved speed is lowered overall load, thus lower potential for hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the main drives, that is one more level of security for any data that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Hosting
All semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer are made on a cloud platform which employs solely SSD drives. We don't use HDDs any longer, so your websites will load quickly since we employ SSDs for each part of the service - files, databases and e-mails. Considering that some customers may host websites that could be more frequently visited than others, we also use numerous drives for caching. Our system finds all of the content that is loaded more often and clones it on these drives so as to load it from them. This configuration is used for load-balancing purposes as we ensure that several reading/writing intensive websites will not affect the performance of the rest of the Internet sites which are stored on the very same primary drive. Using caching drives also increases the lifespan of the main storage SSDs and lowers the potential for disk failures.