A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media which uses flash modules in order to store info. The solid-state drives are still relatively new and more expensive when compared to standard hard disk drives (HDD), but they're faster, so they are quite often employed for Operating Systems and apps on both desktops and hosting servers. An SSD is recommended as it doesn't have spinning disks that limit its speed and can cause overheating like it could happen with an HDD. Many companies employ SSDs for caching purposes, so all the site content which is accessed more frequently will be stored on such drives, while all the other content will be kept on standard HDDs. The main reason to use such a configuration is to balance the cost and performance of their website hosting platform and to reduce the load on the HDDs resulting from countless reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Web Hosting
The cloud platform where we create web hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web applications and static Internet sites will open very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, email addresses and databases, so no matter if you load a page or check for new messages with webmail, the content will load immediately. So as to ensure even better speeds, we also use numerous dedicated SSDs that function only as cache. All the 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 much better performance. What we achieve that way aside from the improved speed is lowered overall load, thus reduced potential for hardware failures, and longer lifespan of the primary drives, that is one more level of security for any information that you upload to your account.