A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules in order to store information. The solid-state drives remain relatively new and more pricey than the standard hard disk drives (HDD), yet they're much faster, so they are frequently used for Operating Systems and applications on both home computer systems and web hosting servers. An SSD is preferred because it does not have spinning disks which restrict its speed and may even cause overheating as it may happen with an HDD. A lot of companies employ SSDs for caching purposes, so all website content that is accessed more frequently will be held on this kind of drives, while all other content will be held on conventional HDDs. The reason to use this kind of a configuration is to balance the cost and overall performance of their website hosting platform and to decrease the load on the HDDs caused by countless reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud platform where we create shared website hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web applications and static websites will open very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, e-mail addresses and databases, so regardless of whether you load a page or check for new e-mail messages using webmail, the content will load right away. To offer even better speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs that work only as cache. All of the content that generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later read from them and not from the main storage drives. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for improved performance. What we achieve this way apart from the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus reduced probability of hardware failures, and extended 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 Servers
All semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer are made on a cloud platform which uses exclusively SSD drives. We don't use HDDs any longer, so your sites will load extremely fast since we employ SSDs for every aspect of the service - files, databases and e-mail addresses. As some users may host sites which are more frequently visited than others, we also use many drives for caching. Our system finds any content which is loaded more frequently and duplicates it on these drives so as to load it from them. This setup is used for load-balancing purposes as we ensure that several reading/writing intensive websites will not affect the performance of the rest of the Internet sites which are stored on the same primary drive. Using caching drives also raises the lifespan of the main storage SSDs and decreases the possibility of disk failures.