A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media which uses flash modules in order to store info. The solid-state drives are still relatively new and more expensive compared to classic hard disk drives (HDD), but they're considerably faster, so they are often employed for Operating Systems and applications on both PCs and web servers. An SSD is recommended as it doesn't have spinning disks which restrict its speed and may even cause overheating like it could happen with an HDD. A lot of companies work with SSDs for caching purposes, so any website content that is accessed more frequently will be located on such drives, while all other content will be kept on ordinary HDDs. The main reason to use this kind of a setup is to balance the price and performance of their web hosting platform and to reduce the load on the HDDs resulting from countless reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Hosting
The cloud platform where we create shared hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web applications and static sites will open very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, e-mails and databases, so regardless of whether you open a page or check for new emails with webmail, the content will load promptly. In order to offer even better speeds, we also use multiple dedicated SSDs which work only as cache. Any content that generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later on read from them and not from the primary storage drives. Of course, that content is replaced dynamically for improved efficiency. What we achieve in this way aside from the better speed is decreased overall load, thus decreased chance of hardware failures, and prolonged lifespan of the main drives, that's one more level of protection for any data that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you register for one of our semi-dedicated server plans, we will save your content on SSD drives and this is valid not just for the files, but also for all databases and emails. This way, your script-driven applications and webmail will load very fast. We work with dedicated SSDs for caching as well. Traffic-intensive site content is duplicated automatically on these drives, so we make certain that several heavy sites that generate a large amount of reading and writing processes will not affect the other sites that share the same drive. By reduction of the overall system load we also boost the lifespan of the primary storage disks and reduce the possibility of a disk failure, so by using SSD drives for caching purposes, we add an additional level of security for your content.