A solid-state drive is much faster than any standard hard disk. It is because an HDD works by using rotating disks, which can rotate only so fast and the more data is read and written, the sluggish and hotter they become, at the same time an SDD operates with modules of flash memory, therefore there are no physically moving components. The access speeds for an SSD are significantly higher, which makes this kind of drives the best solution when speed is needed. That's why SSDs are frequently used for the Operating System on a PC and for keeping data which is used often on web servers. A lot of providers also use a combination of the two drives, so they keep the data on HDDs, but they use one or more SSDs to cache the more frequently used data and as a consequence, the data loads a lot quicker while the load on the HDDs is lowered since their disks have to spin less often in order to read and write.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud platform where we create shared website hosting accounts uses solely SSD drives, so your web applications and static sites will open very fast. The SSDs are used for files, emails and databases, so regardless if you load a page or check for new messages with webmail, the content will load instantly. In order to ensure even better speeds, we also use a group of dedicated SSDs which work only as cache. All the 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 efficiency. What we achieve that way aside from the improved speed is decreased overall load, thus reduced possibility of hardware failures, and extended lifespan of the main drives, that is one more level of protection for any info that you upload to your account.