A solid-state drive (SSD) enhances the performance of each application running on it as compared to a regular hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that a solid-state drive employs a number of interconnected flash memory units, so there are no physical parts to move. In comparison, an HDD works by using spinning disks and each reading or writing process causes the disks to rotate, which means that the speed of an HDD is restricted. Since the cost of the two types of drives also differ, lots of personal computers and web servers are provided with an SSD for the operating system and various applications, and a hard disk for file storage, thus balancing cost and performance. A hosting provider could also use an SSD for caching purposes, thus files which are used frequently will be located on such a drive for accomplishing higher loading speeds and for minimizing the reading/writing processes on the hard-disk drives.
SSD with Data Caching in Cloud Hosting
The cloud platform where we make cloud hosting accounts uses exclusively SSD drives, so your web applications and static Internet sites will open very fast. The SSDs are used for files, email addresses and databases, so regardless of whether you open a page or check for new e-mails with webmail, the content will load very quickly. In order to ensure even greater speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs which work only as cache. All content that generates a lot 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 improved performance. What we achieve this way except for the improved speed is reduced overall load, thus reduced probability of hardware failures, and prolonged lifespan of the primary drives, that is 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 packages, your websites will be stored on a cloud platform which employs exclusively SSD drives for the storage of files, databases and email messages. Together with the revolutionary ZFS file system that we use, this configuration ensures very fast loading speed for any web application hosted on our end. To ensure that the sites of one user don't affect the ones of another one, we also use a number of SSDs as cache - our system discovers files that are accessed more frequently and copies them, so they start loading from the caching drives. The content on the latter is updated dynamically and because of this we can balance the load on all of the drives, guarantee their extended life-span, reduce the risk of disk failures and, of course, supply a fast and reliable Internet hosting service.