VPS is a great hosting solution for a large part of websites, as it provides hosting of quality for an affordable price and concedes to dedicate servers mostly in terms of capacity, which is a neglectable drawback for most medium-sized sites.
However, choosing a VPS you still have options that can affect its eventual performance, choosing the hardware and software for it. One of these is the storage which can be either HDD or SSD, with the former being a more traditional and well-known technology, and the latter being a newer and more promising one. In the following article, we’ll have a look at both of them and at why the SSD will offer a better level of performance to your VPS.
Some more about HDD
Since the rise of computers, most of their components have shown great progress – CPUs, memory, video cards. All of them have increased their performance whereas becoming smaller and more cost-efficient. The only component which has comparatively shown much smaller progress is the storage presented by the hard disk drive, that in years has remained pretty much the same device. That is it has for the most part only increased the volume of the storage, while the technology has remained pretty much the same: a rotating mechanical magnetic disk on which the information is recorded and from which retrieved via the moving read-write head.
The storage is the component of your computer that not only is responsible for storing data and accessing it once in a while, but it provides the operation of every program as each program requires files that are stored in the storage and accessed during the programs running. That’s where the HDDs meet problems, as, even considered, that the general writing-reading speed of the HDDs increased over years – from 30-40 MB/sec to 120-150 MB/sec – the mechanism of the head moving from one part of the disk to the other one pertains and eventually leads to reduced performance. Moreover, the presence of moving parts makes the HDD less reliable over time, as the moving parts wear out. All these factors may be of importance, especially if you are looking for a server to host your website, as websites need to be fast, secure, and fault-tolerant. Therefore, it might be a good idea to find a better alternative to HDD-based VPS – and this might be SSD.
What is SSD?
SDD (short for solid drive) is a type of storage device that is based upon integrated circuit assemblies that are also used, for example, in flash memory. This technology doesn’t involve moving parts, unlike HDD, which makes it more reliable, and provides a higher input/output per second and lower latency. In the following, we’ll have a closer look at the advantages, provided by this state of things.
Advantages of SSD over HDD
- Speed. SSD is generally faster than HDDs. For example, to process the data an HDD would require up to 40 seconds, an SSD needs only 10 or 15.
- Reliability. The fact that the HDD has that many many moving parts provide that the drive wears out faster. With SSD consisting of micro schemes, it is not the case, so they can serve you longer.
- Size. The micro scheme structure of SSD also is responsible for its being pretty lightweight, which usually isn’t over 100 grams. All details of HDD, on the contrary, occupy a great deal of space and weigh also enough.
- Energy consumption. SSD is also a more energy-efficient solution. While HDD may consume up to 7W per hour at a high load, an SSD won’t consume more than 2W, that is, three times less. Good for your wallet, good for the environment.
- Costs. The costs are the main weak point of the SSD, with technology being a more expensive one. However, for many purposes, the choice will pay off. In the following section, we’ll see, for whom an SSD VPS is a better choice.
Who is most likely to need an SSD VPS?
SSD VPS will make the most sense for the websites that deal with bigger amounts of data. For example, WordPress or Drupal-based websites that actively use databases. Another one is e-commerce websites, also for the fact that they deal with high traffic peaks and have to provide a generally higher level of user experience. Subsequently, SSD VPS will show better results when we deal with SEO optimization as increasing the site’s speed and fault-tolerance contributes a lot. Sites using high amounts of cache or broadcast media will also benefit from an SSD VPS, also to its powerful processing capacity.
Conclusion
As you have seen, an SSD VPS is generally renowned for its ability to operate bigger amounts of data showing a higher level of performance and reliability and being generally more compact and less energy-consuming. This makes it a better choice if you are ready to pay more for getting a site that copes better with bigger amounts of data, examples of which we’ve listed. If your site belongs to this group, we highly recommend checking out HostZealots VPS hosting SSD. We hope that this article was useful and you’ll make the right choice for the hosting of your website. Take care!
