Proper SSD hosting is a necessary foundation for a fast website. As well as speed benefits, SSD hosting is much more reliable than web hosting powered by old school moving part drives. Read on to find out more about what SSD hosting is and why it has such great advantages for website owners!
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What is SSD hosting?
SSD stands for “solid state disk” drive, which is a type of drive that doesn’t have moving parts (if you’re interested in more detailed technical explanations, you can read more about SSD drives here).
Although they’re more expensive than traditional drives, SSD drives are much better than their budget hard disk drive (HDD) counterparts. Because they don’t have moving parts, they’re much more resilient and reliable. They also have lower latency, which means they can find and serve files to you and your visitors much faster.
Just like a lot of computers are sold with SSD drives, web servers can be fitted with them too. Your website’s files are stored on these drives much like your files are stored on your computer’s hard drive.
All Lyrical Host websites are powered by Samsung SSD drives, so you can rest assured that you’re getting great performance. It’s one of the reasons why our hosting is faster than many US hosts even from the UK! You can learn more about the technology we use on our Platforms & Technologies page, and our Speed & Security page.
Why is SSD hosting so important?
01. Speed
Think of it like having to fast forward a video cassette compared to just picking a scene you want to go to on a DVD. One takes a lot of time to find the right place, one is pretty much instant. When you or one of your visitors is browsing your site, a website backed by SSD web space can find and serve the pages much faster than one backed by a standard hard drive.
If your website files are stored on a regular old hard drive, regardless of how well your images are optimized and how few plugins are used, your site will always be slower than the same site powered by SSD hosting. So your site is already, and always, at a disadvantage even before you’ve finished building it if you don’t have SSD hosting.
02. Reliability
SSD drives are highly resilient, much less vulnerable to physical shocks, and because they don’t have moving parts, there’s less that can wear out or go wrong. For these reasons, your website files are less at risk from loss compared to if they were hosted on regular old style hard drives.
Full SSD hosting vs. cached SSD hosting
To save money, many hosts offer what they call SSD web space, but it’s actually only their cache that uses SSD hardware. This means that anyone visiting an uncached page, or a page where the cache has expired will have to load the page from the standard hard drive, rather than the SSD. It saves the host money, but it’s misleading to customers and doesn’t provide the same performance as full SSD web space.
Always check with a web host what kind of SSD space they provide on the plan you’re looking to buy. At Lyrical Host, all our plans feature full SSD web space as standard.
What are the downsides of SSD hosting?
The only real disadvantage of SSD hosting is the cost of the drives. Just like an SSD drive in a computer, SSDs for web servers are more expensive than regular hard drives. This is only a minor disadvantage compared to the huge benefits, and theoretically this shouldn’t affect you as a website owner, but some hosts pass the costs of the drives on to their customers in the form of pricier hosting packages.
To sum up, if you care about your website, you should always make sure you’re using a host who will assign your website full SSD web space. It’s faster, it’s more reliable, and it should be one of the key things you look for; not all hosting is created equal!
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