We explore the advantages of solid-state drives benefits over hard disk drives and look into the further benefits of having a web host company who provides solid state storage over HDD.
Benefits of SSD hosting over HDD hosting
Let’s learn first what is SSD?
SSD stands for Solid State Drive. They are the latest type of computer storage device. These days you will find them in many high-end desktops & laptops & they are increasingly being used in the hosting industry & by large corporations to store data within their server infrastructure.
Unlike the HDD, the SSD stores data on microchips. Because it has no moving parts that have to reach a specific point to read the data, the SSD has virtually no delays in serving the read/write requests.
But let’s put it this way, What does this mean for your website?
Here are few advantages you might want to consider while using SSD hosting for your website
- Better performance
Obviously, performance is the most important benefit of SSD over traditional hard drives. When we refer to the performance we mean website loading time. Speed is a very important factor these days and the faster your website can load the better. On average, websites should not take more than 3-4 seconds to load and SSD can help you a lot in this manner.
- Reliability
SSD are generally more reliable than non-SSD drives since they don’t have any moving parts and they don’t wear out over time. This does not mean that traditional hard drives are not to be trusted, it just means that SSDs use a more efficient technology that can stand better over time.
- Environment-friendly
SSDs consume less power compared to normal disks and they are thought as a more environment-friendly solution. From the consumer point of you, you are getting better performance in a greener way which is what is needed these days.
Servers that don’t use SSD
For years servers have used the standard HDD or Hard Disk Drives for storage. These rely on physical spinning platters or disks with moving mechanical parts.
The capacity and efficiency of standard hard drives have risen over the years. But they are still limited by the physical constraints of the technology.
Data is not stored sequentially on a hard drive when it is written. So the physical magnetic heads of an HDD need to seek back and forth over the platters to gather all your data, which can slow things down.
A website that uses a large database or performs heavy I/O operations, will see the largest improvements when using an SSD instead. As your hard drive will be the bottleneck that the server is waiting on before serving your web page to a visitor.
With no physical moving parts to slow it down, a server with an SSD can read data much faster than a standard HDD.
The Disadvantages of SSD Hosting
Though SSD hosting comes with a lot of advantages to keeping your website fast, secure and stable, it is also along with some limitations.
- Expensive Price
There is no free lunch in the world. Along with rich features and excellent performance, SSD hosting also comes with an expensive price. While the price of SSDs has continued to decline in 2012, SSDs are still about 7 to 8 times more expensive than per unit of storage than HHDs. For this reason, SSD hosting is 50% more expensive than common web hosting averagely.
However, in order to ensure that your site has a good user experience and the ability to stand a large number of visitors, it is worth to spend a little more money to purchase the really excellent SSD hosting.
Conclusion-
It seems clear that SSD is the future for data storage & in particular for web hosting.
Now here at Avonhost.com we only use servers that are equipped with SSD for more faster and reliable experience for our consumers.
