A solid-state drive (SSD) enhances the performance of every app running on it when compared to a classic hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that a solid-state drive functions with a variety of interconnected flash memory units, so there're no physical parts to move. In contrast, a hard disk features spinning disks and each reading or writing process causes the disks to move, which means that the speed of an HDD is limited. As the cost of the two types of drives are also different, lots of PCs and web servers are provided with an SSD for the operating system and various applications, and a hard disk for data storage, this way balancing price and overall performance. A web hosting service provider could also use an SSD for caching purposes, which means that files that are accessed very often will be saved on this type of a drive for achieving better loading speeds and for minimizing the reading/writing processes on the hard disks.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Hosting
The cloud platform where we create shared hosting accounts uses exclusively SSD drives, so your web applications and static Internet sites will load very fast. The SSDs are used for files, e-mail addresses and databases, so no matter if you open a page or check for new e-mail messages through webmail, the content will load immediately. In order to ensure even greater speeds, we also use numerous dedicated SSDs that function only as cache. Any content which generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later read from them and not from the primary storage drives. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for much better efficiency. What we achieve this way except for the better speed is decreased overall load, thus reduced probability of hardware failures, and prolonged lifespan of the primary drives, that is one more level of protection 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 made on a cloud platform which uses exclusively SSD drives. We do not use HDDs anymore, so your sites will load very fast as we employ SSDs for every aspect of the service - files, databases and emails. As some people may host sites which are more popular than others, we also use multiple drives for caching. Our system discovers any content which is accessed more regularly and duplicates it on these drives so as to load it from them. This setup is used for load-balancing purposes as we make sure that several reading/writing intensive sites will not influence the performance of the other Internet sites that are stored on the very same main drive. Using caching drives also increases the life-span of the main storage SSDs and lowers the potential for disk failures.