A solid-state drive (SSD) improves the performance of each application running on it in comparison to an ordinary hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that a solid-state drive uses a variety of interconnected flash memory modules, so there're no physical parts to move. In contrast, a hard-disk drive functions with spinning disks and every reading or writing process causes the disks to move, so the speed of an HDD is fixed. As the cost of the two types of drives are also different, many computer systems and web servers are set up with an SSD for the operating system and random applications, and a hard-disk drive for file storage, in this way balancing price and effectiveness. A web hosting provider could also use an SSD for caching purposes, so files that are accessed on a regular basis will be stored on this type of a drive for accomplishing improved loading speeds and for minimizing the reading/writing processes on the HDDs.
SSD with Data Caching in Cloud Web Hosting
The cloud platform where we make cloud web hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web applications and static websites will load very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, emails and databases, so regardless if you open a page or check for new e-mails with webmail, the content will load right away. In order to ensure 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 much better efficiency. What we achieve this way in addition to the improved speed is reduced overall load, thus decreased chance of hardware failures, and prolonged lifespan of the main 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
All semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide are made on a cloud platform that uses exclusively SSD drives. We do not use HDDs anymore, so your sites will load very fast because we employ SSDs for every aspect of the service - files, databases and e-mails. As some people may host Internet sites which can be more popular than others, we also use a number of drives for caching. Our system detects all of the content which is loaded more frequently and copies 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 sites 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 lifespan of the main storage SSDs and decreases the possibility of disk failures.