A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules in order to save info. The SSDs are still relatively new and more pricey when compared to classic hard disk drives (HDD), but they are faster, so they are frequently used for Operating Systems and applications on both PCs and web servers. An SSD is recommended because it doesn't have spinning disks which restrict its speed and can cause overheating as it may happen with an HDD. A number of companies use SSDs for caching purposes, so all the site content that is accessed more frequently will be kept on this kind of drives, while all other content will be located on standard HDDs. The reason to use such a configuration is to balance the price and performance of their Internet hosting platform and to lower the load on the HDDs resulting from countless reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud platform where we create shared website hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web apps and static Internet sites will load very fast. The SSDs are used for files, e-mail addresses and databases, so regardless of whether you open a page or check for new emails through webmail, the content will load immediately. In order to offer even higher speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs that 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 main storage drives. Needless to say, that content is replaced dynamically for improved performance. What we achieve that way aside from the improved speed is reduced overall load, thus decreased probability of hardware failures, and extended lifespan of the primary drives, that's one more level of security for any info that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Hosting
All semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer are created on a cloud platform which uses exclusively SSD drives. We don't use HDDs any longer, so your websites will load very quickly because we employ SSDs for every aspect of the service - files, databases and emails. Considering that some customers may host websites that could be more popular than others, we also use a number of drives for caching. Our system finds all the content which is accessed more often and duplicates it on these drives so as to load it from them. This setup is used for load-balancing purposes as we make sure that several reading/writing intensive websites will not influence the performance of the other sites that are stored on the same primary drive. Using caching drives also raises the life-span of the main storage SSDs and reduces the probability of disk failures.