A solid-state drive (SSD) improves the performance of each app running on it when compared with a regular hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that an SSD works by using multiple interconnected flash memory units, so there're no physical parts to move. In contrast, an HDD features spinning disks and any reading or writing process causes the disks to rotate, meaning the speed of an HDD is fixed. Because the prices of the two kinds of drives are different as well, a lot of PCs and web servers are set up with an SSD for the OS and various applications, and a hard-disk drive for data storage, thus balancing price and effectiveness. A web hosting service provider could also use a solid-state drive for caching purposes, thus files which are accessed regularly will be kept on this type of a drive for reaching better loading speeds and for minimizing the reading/writing processes on the hard-disk drives.
SSD with Data Caching in Web Hosting
In case you host your sites in a web hosting account with us, you will notice their excellent performance. The reason is that our cloud platform uses only SSD drives for all files, e-mails and databases and we do not use HDDs for any part of the web hosting service. In addition to the advanced ZFS file system, this setup will raise the speed of your websites significantly. For load-balancing, we also use a number of SSDs for caching purposes only. All content which generates more traffic or creates a lot of reading/writing processes is duplicated on them automatically, so that the load on the main drives will be lower, thus the overall performance of all websites hosted with us will improve. This subsequently prolongs the life of the primary drives and reduces the chance of a disk failure, that is an additional guarantee for the reliability of all content that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Servers
All semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer are created on a cloud platform that uses only SSD drives. We don't use HDDs any longer, so your Internet sites will load very fast since we use SSDs for each aspect of the service - files, databases and e-mails. Considering that some customers may host sites which can be more popular than others, we also use numerous drives for caching. Our system finds all the content which is accessed more frequently and duplicates it on these drives in order to load it from them. This configuration is used for load-balancing purposes as we guarantee that several reading/writing intensive sites will not affect the performance of the rest of the sites which are stored on the very same main drive. Using caching drives also raises the life-span of the main storage SSDs and decreases the chance of disk failures.