A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules to save data. The solid-state drives remain fairly new and more pricey than the standard hard disk drives (HDD), however they are considerably faster, so they are quite often employed for Operating Systems and apps on both personal computers and hosting servers. An SSD is recommended as it doesn't have spinning disks which restrict its speed and could cause overheating as it may happen with an HDD. Many companies employ SSDs for caching purposes, so any website content that is accessed more often will be located on such drives, while all other content will be stored on ordinary HDDs. The main reason to use this kind of a setup is to balance the price and overall performance of their website hosting platform and to decrease the load on the HDDs resulting from countless reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Cloud Website Hosting
The cloud platform where we create cloud website hosting accounts uses exclusively SSD drives, so your web applications and static Internet sites will load very fast. The SSDs are used for files, e-mails and databases, so no matter if you load a page or check for new email messages using webmail, the content will load right away. To offer even better speeds, we also use multiple dedicated SSDs which work only as cache. All of the content that generates a lot of traffic is copied on them automatically and is afterwards read from them and not from the main storage drives. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for better performance. What we achieve this way apart from the better speed is lowered overall load, thus decreased chance of hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the primary drives, that's one more level of protection for any information that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Hosting
All semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide are created on a cloud platform which employs only SSD drives. We do not use HDDs anymore, so your websites will load very fast as we employ SSDs for each part of the service - files, databases and e-mail addresses. Considering that some users may host Internet sites which could be more frequently visited than others, we also use a number of drives for caching. Our system detects all the content that 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 guarantee that several reading/writing intensive sites will not affect the performance of the other sites which are stored on the same main drive. Using caching drives also raises the lifespan of the main storage SSDs and reduces the probability of disk failures.