A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media which uses flash modules so as to store information. The SSDs are still relatively new and more pricey when compared to classic hard disk drives (HDD), yet they're much faster, so they are frequently employed for Operating Systems and applications on both desktops and web hosting servers. An SSD is preferred 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 all the site content which is accessed more often will be located on this kind of drives, while all the other content will be kept on ordinary HDDs. The reason to use this type of a configuration is to balance the price and overall performance of their hosting platform and to decrease the load on the HDDs resulting from intense reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Website Hosting
The cloud platform where we create website hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web applications and static Internet sites will open extremely fast. The SSDs are used for files, e-mails and databases, so regardless of whether you open a page or check for new email messages with webmail, the content will load instantly. To offer even better speeds, we also use multiple dedicated SSDs that function only as cache. All of the content that generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is afterwards read from them and not from the main storage drives. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for improved efficiency. What we achieve by doing this apart from the improved speed is lowered overall load, thus reduced potential for hardware failures, and prolonged lifespan of the main drives, which is one more level of security for any info 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 that employs solely SSD drives. We don't use HDDs anymore, so your sites will load very fast as we employ SSDs for every aspect of the service - files, databases and e-mails. Considering that some customers may host sites that could be more popular than others, we also use many drives for caching. Our system finds all of the content which is loaded more regularly and duplicates it on these drives so as to load it from them. This configuration is used for load-balancing purposes as we make sure that several reading/writing intensive Internet sites will not influence the performance of the rest of the websites that are stored on the same primary drive. Using caching drives also raises the life-span of the main storage SSDs and lowers the chance of disk failures.