A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media which uses flash modules so as to store information. The SSDs are still fairly new and more pricey than the standard hard disk drives (HDD), yet they're faster, so they are often used for Operating Systems and applications on both home computer systems and web hosting servers. An SSD is preferred because it doesn't have spinning disks that limit its speed and may even cause overheating like it could happen with an HDD. Most companies use SSDs for caching purposes, so all site content which is accessed more often will be kept on this type of drives, while all other content will be stored on standard HDDs. The reason to use this type of a configuration is to balance the price and performance of their Internet hosting platform and to lower the load on the HDDs caused by numerous reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Hosting
The cloud platform where we make shared hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web apps and static websites will load extremely fast. The SSDs are used for files, emails and databases, so regardless of whether you open a page or check for new emails using webmail, the content will load without delay. In order to ensure even greater speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs which function only as cache. All the 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 much better efficiency. What we achieve this way in addition to the improved speed is reduced overall load, thus decreased chance of hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the main drives, which is one more level of protection for any data that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you purchase one of our semi-dedicated server plans, your sites will be stored on a cloud platform that employs solely SSD drives for the storage of files, databases and emails. Along with the advanced ZFS file system that we use, this setup guarantees very fast loading speed for each web app hosted on our end. To ensure that the Internet sites of one customer won'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 copies them, so they start loading from the caching drives. The content on the latter is updated dynamically and because of this we can balance the load on all the drives, warrant their extended lifespan, minimize the risk of disk failures and, of course, provide a super fast and reliable web hosting service.