A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules in order to save information. The solid-state drives remain fairly new and more expensive compared to classic hard disk drives (HDD), however they're considerably faster, so they are often used for Operating Systems and applications on both personal computers and servers. An SSD is recommended as it does not have spinning disks which restrict its speed and can even cause overheating like it may happen with an HDD. Many companies work with SSDs for caching purposes, so all of the site content that is accessed more frequently will be located on such drives, while all other content will be held on ordinary HDDs. The reason to use such a setup is to balance the price and overall performance of their website hosting platform and to minimize the load on the HDDs caused by countless reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Web Hosting
The cloud platform where we make web hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web applications and static sites will load very fast. The SSDs are used for files, email addresses and databases, so regardless if you open a page or check for new e-mails with webmail, the content will load right away. To ensure even higher speeds, we also use multiple dedicated SSDs which work only as cache. All the content that 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 efficiency. What we achieve this way aside from the improved speed is reduced overall load, thus lower chance of hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the main drives, that's one more level of security for any data that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you purchase one of our semi-dedicated server plans, your Internet sites will be stored on a cloud platform which employs solely SSD drives for the storage of files, databases and e-mail messages. Together with the leading-edge ZFS file system that we use, this setup guarantees fast loading speed for any web app hosted on our end. To guarantee that the sites of one user will not affect the ones of another, we also use a number of SSDs as cache - our system detects files which are accessed more frequently and duplicates them, so they start loading from the caching drives. The content on the latter is updated dynamically and consequently we can balance the load on all of the drives, warrant their extended life-span, reduce the risk of disk failures and, of course, provide you with a fast and reliable web hosting service.