A solid-state drive (SSD) enhances the performance of every application running on it as compared with a regular hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that an SSD works by using many different interconnected flash memory modules, so there're no physical parts to move. In contrast, a hard-disk drive contains spinning disks and any reading or writing process causes the disks to spin, which means that the speed of an HDD is restricted. Since the prices of the two kinds of drives are also different, lots of PCs and web servers are set up with an SSD for the OS and various applications, and an HDD for file storage, in this way balancing cost and overall performance. A website hosting service provider can also use a solid-state drive for caching purposes, thus files that are accessed very often will be saved on this type of a drive for reaching higher loading speeds and for limiting the reading/writing processes on the HDDs.
SSD with Data Caching in Cloud Website Hosting
The cloud platform where we create cloud website hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web applications and static Internet sites will load very fast. The SSDs are used for files, e-mail addresses and databases, so regardless of whether you open a page or check for new email messages with webmail, the content will load promptly. In order to offer even higher speeds, we also use multiple dedicated SSDs that function only as cache. All the content which generates a lot of traffic is copied on them automatically and is afterwards read from them and not from the main storage drives. Of course, that content is replaced dynamically for improved efficiency. What we achieve in this way apart from the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus lower chance of hardware failures, and extended lifespan of the primary drives, that is one more level of security for any data that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Hosting
All semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer are created on a cloud platform which uses exclusively SSD drives. We don't use HDDs anymore, so your websites will load quickly as we employ SSDs for every aspect of the service - files, databases and emails. Considering that some users may host websites that are more popular than others, we also use many drives for caching. Our system identifies all the content which is accessed more often and copies it on these drives so as to load it from them. This configuration 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 that are stored on the very same main drive. Using caching drives also increases the life-span of the main storage SSDs and lowers the potential for disk failures.