A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media which uses flash modules in order to save information. The solid-state drives remain relatively new and more pricey than the classic hard disk drives (HDD), yet they are considerably faster, so they are often used for Operating Systems and applications on both PCs and web hosting servers. An SSD is preferred because it doesn't have spinning disks that limit its speed and may cause overheating as it may happen with an HDD. A lot of companies work with SSDs for caching purposes, so all content that is accessed more frequently will be kept on such drives, while all the other content will be located on regular HDDs. The main reason to use this kind of a setup is to balance the price and performance of their website hosting platform and to reduce the load on the HDDs caused by numerous reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Web Hosting
The cloud platform where we create web hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web apps and static sites will load very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, e-mail addresses and databases, so no matter if you load a page or check for new emails through webmail, the content will load promptly. To offer even higher speeds, we also use a number of dedicated SSDs which work only as cache. Any content that generates a lot of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later read from them and not from the primary storage drives. Of course, that content is replaced dynamically for much better performance. What we achieve this way aside from the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus lower potential for hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the main drives, which is 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 created on a cloud platform which uses exclusively SSD drives. We do not use HDDs any longer, so your websites will load extremely fast since we use SSDs for each part of the service - files, databases and emails. Considering that some customers may host websites which can be more frequently visited than others, we also use many drives for caching. Our system finds any content which is accessed more often and duplicates 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 Internet sites will not affect the performance of the other websites which are stored on the very same primary drive. Using caching drives also increases the life-span of the main storage SSDs and reduces the possibility of disk failures.