A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules in order to store data. The solid-state drives are still relatively new and more pricey compared to standard hard disk drives (HDD), yet they're much faster, so they are often used for Operating Systems and apps on both desktops and web servers. An SSD is recommended because it doesn't have spinning disks which limit its speed and can even cause overheating like it may happen with an HDD. A lot of companies use SSDs for caching purposes, so all of the content that is accessed more frequently will be kept on this type of drives, while all the other content will be kept on conventional HDDs. The main reason to use this type of a setup is to balance the cost and performance of their web hosting platform and to reduce the load on the HDDs caused by numerous reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Cloud Hosting
The cloud platform where we make cloud hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web apps and static sites will open very fast. The SSDs are used for files, e-mails and databases, so regardless of whether you open a page or check for new emails using webmail, the content will load instantly. To offer even higher speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs which work only as cache. Any content which generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is afterwards read from them and not from the primary storage drives. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for improved performance. What we achieve in this way aside from the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus reduced potential for hardware failures, and extended 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 Servers
All semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide are created on a cloud platform which uses exclusively SSD drives. We don't use HDDs any longer, so your sites will load quickly because we employ SSDs for every part of the service - files, databases and emails. Considering that some users may host Internet sites that are more popular than others, we also use numerous drives for caching. Our system finds all the content which is loaded more often and copies it on these drives in order 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 other sites that are stored on the same primary drive. Using caching drives also increases the life-span of the main storage SSDs and reduces the chance of disk failures.