A solid-state drive (SSD) boosts the performance of any app running on it in comparison with a common hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that an SSD works by using a variety of interconnected flash memory units, so there're no physical parts to move. In contrast, an HDD functions with spinning disks and every reading or writing process causes the disks to spin, which means that the speed of an HDD is limited. Since the cost of the two types of drives also differ, many PCs and web servers are equipped with an SSD for the OS and various applications, and an HDD for file storage, this way balancing cost and overall performance. An Internet hosting provider could also use an SSD for caching purposes, which means that files which are accessed regularly will be saved on this type of a drive for reaching higher loading speeds and for limiting the reading/writing processes on the hard disks.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Hosting
The cloud platform where we create shared hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web apps and static Internet sites will open very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, email addresses and databases, so no matter if you load a page or check for new e-mails using webmail, the content will load immediately. So as to ensure even higher speeds, we also use a number of dedicated SSDs that function only as cache. All of the content which generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later on read from them and not from the main storage drives. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for better efficiency. What we achieve that way aside from the improved speed is reduced overall load, thus reduced probability of hardware failures, and prolonged lifespan of the primary drives, which 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 provide are created on a cloud platform that employs exclusively SSD drives. We do not use HDDs any longer, so your websites will load quickly since we use SSDs for each part of the service - files, databases and e-mail addresses. Considering that some customers may host Internet sites which can be more frequently visited than others, we also use many drives for caching. Our system finds all of the content which is accessed more regularly and clones it on these drives in order to load it from them. This setup is used for load-balancing purposes as we make sure that several reading/writing intensive sites will not influence the performance of the rest of the Internet sites 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.