A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules in order to save information. The SSDs remain fairly new and more expensive than the classic hard disk drives (HDD), but they are faster, so they are frequently used for Operating Systems and apps on both PCs and servers. An SSD is preferred as it doesn't have spinning disks that limit its speed and could cause overheating like it may happen with an HDD. A large number of companies employ SSDs for caching purposes, so any website content that is accessed more often will be located on such drives, while all other content will be kept on regular HDDs. The reason to use this kind of a setup is to balance the price and 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 Hosting
The cloud platform where we create hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web apps and static Internet sites will open very fast. The SSDs are used for files, emails and databases, so regardless if you open a page or check for new email messages with webmail, the content will load quickly. To offer even greater speeds, we also use a number of 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 better efficiency. What we achieve by doing this aside from the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus reduced chance of hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the primary 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
In case you subscribe for one of our semi-dedicated hosting solutions, we will store your content on SSD drives and this is valid not just for the files, but also for all databases and e-mails. This way, your script-driven applications and webmail will load very fast. We work with dedicated SSDs for caching too. Traffic-intensive content is duplicated automatically on these drives, so we make sure that several heavy websites which generate plenty of reading and writing processes won't affect the other websites that share the very same drive. By reduction of the overall system load we also raise the lifespan of the main storage disks and reduce the possibility of a disk failure, so by using SSD drives for caching purposes, we add one more level of stability for your site content.