A solid-state drive (SSD) improves the performance of any application running on it in comparison with a regular hard-disk drive (HDD). The reason is that an SSD uses many different interconnected flash memory units, so there're no physical parts to move. In contrast, a hard disk uses spinning disks and every reading or writing process causes the disks to spin, meaning the speed of an HDD is restricted. As the prices of the two kinds of drives are also different, lots of PCs and web servers are equipped with an SSD for the OS and various applications, and a hard disk for file storage, this way balancing price and effectiveness. A hosting provider may also use a solid-state drive for caching purposes, so files which are accessed repeatedly will be saved on such a drive for accomplishing better loading speeds and for limiting the reading/writing processes on the hard drives.
SSD with Data Caching in Hosting
The cloud platform where we make hosting accounts uses exclusively SSD drives, so your web apps and static websites will load very fast. The SSDs are used for files, e-mail addresses and databases, so regardless if you load a page or check for new e-mails through webmail, the content will load without delay. So as to offer even greater speeds, we also use multiple dedicated SSDs which function only as cache. All 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 much better performance. What we achieve by doing this in addition to the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus decreased possibility of hardware failures, and extended lifespan of the primary drives, that's one more level of security for any information 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 employs solely SSD drives. We don't use HDDs any longer, so your Internet sites will load amazingly quickly as we use SSDs for all aspects of the service - files, databases and e-mails. Considering that some users may host sites that could be more frequently visited than others, we also use many drives for caching. Our system discovers all of the content that is loaded more often and duplicates it on these drives in order to load it from them. This setup 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 Internet sites that are stored on the very same primary drive. Using caching drives also increases the lifespan of the main storage SSDs and lowers the chance of disk failures.