There are many aspects to take into consideration, when shopping around for an ideal web hosting solution, especially when it comes to launching a dynamically growing, data- and traffic-intensive business projects. Needless to say that a hard drive type of a server should be one of your top priorities as it is not just a data storage facility, but actually the cornerstone ensuring top-notch, fast performance and reliability of your entire online business venture.

Just as any other technologies, storage platforms also continuously improve, with SSDs (solid-state drives) being the latest invention available today. In fact, they have made a real breakthrough in the entire computing and hosting industry by offering a completely new way of storing digital data backed by plenty of unsurpassed advantages. That’s why, SSDs are considered to be the hottest trend among data storage technologies. They are gradually taking place of traditional HDD drives and predicted to eventually replace them completely in a couple of years only.

As it is quite obvious, SSD drives are somehow more expensive than their HDD alternatives. Let’s dive deeper into the essence of SSD technology in order to understand better how it can benefit your business website performance and whether its extra cost is really worth your investments.

Memory

In fact, ‘SSD’ stands for a ‘solid-state drive’ and presents a revolutionary new data storage device that instead of standard memory chips, uses NAND-based memory with integrated circuit assemblies, just like flash drives. Due to this advancement, SSDs allow to store and retain the whole web data pretty much more persistently than their traditional electromagnetic predecessors, even in the case of power failure, since no external power supply is required for a solid-state drive.

Construction

Frankly speaking, the core difference between SSDs and HDDs lies in the construction itself. There are no moving or spinning mechanical elements (e.g. disks and read/write heads) in solid state drives at all. Such a solid construction makes SSDs non-prone to any physical tear or wear and, therefore, ensures their virtually unlimited lifespan, which is absolutely impossible with traditional HDD drives. It’s also worth to point out here, SSDs come with electronic interfaces featuring full compatibility with standard block input/output hard drives.

Energy-Efficiency

Furthermore, solid-state drives consume very little power, which makes them a great energy-efficient alternative to electromechanical drives. Such low power consumption rates also allow them to stay significantly cooler than HDDs and consequently release you from any heat-related issues that may occur to your web server.

Input/Output Rates

To continue speaking about core differences, SSD drives provide input/output (I/O) rates along with blazing disk access times that simply no HDD drive can offer. In such a way, while being hosted on an SSD-based web server, your mission-critical business or corporate web projects will never experience slow operation. Instead, they will enjoy rocket-fast, top-notch performance with virtually zero-rate I/O waiting times or any other related drive bottlenecks.

Some other SSD significant advantages include: no file fragmentation hassles, the fastest sustained random read/write IOPS, consistent high read performance, blazing booting and application loading, unmatched shock and vibration resistance and almost silent operation to name a few.

Due to the all above mentioned advantages, SSD drives have started to gain enormous popularity in the web hosting field. They allow delivering superior, unmatched disk performance while ensuring ultimate web data reliability and security. Nowadays, there is hardly any other data storage technology that competes with SSDs in terms of performance, speed and stability. That’s why, if all these options are among your top priorities, then an SSD-based VPS or dedicated server is the only hosting solution to consider.

Written by Greg Rockwood: a community and PR manager at Softsys Hosting, an established provider of VPS and dedicated servers, based on the SSD technology.