A solid-state drive (SSD) is a media that uses flash modules so as to store data. The solid-state drives are still fairly new and more expensive compared to classic hard disk drives (HDD), but they're faster, so they are frequently employed for Operating Systems and apps on both desktops and hosting servers. An SSD is preferred as it doesn't have spinning disks that limit its speed and may even cause overheating like it may happen with an HDD. A large number of companies employ SSDs for caching purposes, so any website content that is accessed more often will be held on such drives, while all other content will be held on conventional HDDs. The reason to use this kind of a configuration is to balance the price and performance of their hosting platform and to reduce the load on the HDDs caused by intense reading and writing processes.
SSD with Data Caching in Shared Hosting
The cloud platform where we make shared hosting accounts uses only SSD drives, so your web applications and static sites will open very quickly. The SSDs are used for files, e-mails and databases, so regardless if you open a page or check for new messages with webmail, the content will load instantly. To offer even greater speeds, we also use numerous dedicated SSDs which function only as cache. All content that generates lots of traffic is copied on them automatically and is later on read from them and not from the main storage drives. Of course, that content is replaced dynamically for better efficiency. What we achieve this way aside from the better speed is lowered overall load, thus reduced possibility of hardware failures, and extended lifespan of the main drives, that's one more level of security for any information that you upload to your account.