A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules so as to save data. The SSDs remain relatively new and more expensive when compared to standard hard disk drives (HDD), but they're much faster, so they are frequently used for Operating Systems and apps on both home PCs and servers. An SSD is recommended as it doesn't have spinning disks which limit its speed and may even cause overheating like it may happen with an HDD. Lots of companies employ SSDs for caching purposes, so any content which is accessed more often will be kept on this kind of drives, while all the other content will be stored on standard HDDs. The main reason to use this type of a configuration is to balance the cost and performance of their hosting platform and to minimize the load on the HDDs resulting from numerous reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Website Hosting
The cloud platform where we create website hosting accounts uses exclusively SSD drives, so your web applications and static sites will load extremely fast. The SSDs are used for files, email addresses and databases, so regardless if you load a page or check for new email messages using webmail, the content will load very quickly. So as to offer even better speeds, we also use multiple dedicated SSDs that function only as cache. All the content that generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later read from them and not from the primary storage drives. Of course, that content is replaced dynamically for improved efficiency. What we achieve that way except for the improved speed is reduced overall load, thus reduced possibility of hardware failures, and extended lifespan of the main drives, which is one more level of security for any information that you upload to your account.
SSD with Data Caching in Semi-dedicated Servers
All semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide are made on a cloud platform that uses exclusively SSD drives. We don't use HDDs any longer, so your Internet sites will load very fast since we use SSDs for every part of the service - files, databases and e-mail addresses. As some people may host sites that could be more frequently visited than others, we also use many drives for caching. Our system finds any content which is loaded more regularly and copies it on these drives in order 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 Internet sites which are stored on the very same primary drive. Using caching drives also increases the life-span of the main storage SSDs and lowers the possibility of disk failures.