A solid-state drive (SSD) improves the performance of each app running on it when compared with a regular hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that a solid-state drive functions with a variety of interconnected flash memory modules, so there are no physical parts to move. In comparison, an HDD functions with spinning disks and any reading or writing process causes the disks to move, so the speed of an HDD is limited. As the prices of the two types of drives are also different, lots of personal computers and web servers are equipped with an SSD for the operating system and random applications, and a hard disk for file storage, thus balancing price and overall performance. A hosting service provider may also use an SSD for caching purposes, thus files that are accessed repeatedly will be held 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 solely SSD drives, so your web applications and static sites will open very fast. The SSDs are used for files, email addresses and databases, so regardless of whether you load a page or check for new messages with webmail, the content will load immediately. So as to offer even higher speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs which function only as cache. All of the content which generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is afterwards 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 in addition to the better speed is reduced overall load, thus reduced potential for hardware failures, and prolonged lifespan of the primary drives, that's one more level of security for any information that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Hosting
All semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide are created on a cloud platform that uses solely SSD drives. We don't use HDDs anymore, so your sites will load quickly as we use SSDs for each aspect of the service - files, databases and emails. As some customers may host sites that are more frequently visited than others, we also use multiple drives for caching. Our system discovers all of the content which is loaded more frequently and copies it on these drives in order to load it from them. This configuration is used for load-balancing purposes as we ensure that several reading/writing intensive sites will not affect the performance of the other websites that are stored on the same primary drive. Using caching drives also increases the lifespan of the main storage SSDs and lowers the chance of disk failures.