What is going on?
“We now use SSD!” This phrase is everywhere nowadays, advertised hard by web hosting providers. But not all solid-state disks (SSD) are created equal.
The wrong SSD, or the wrong RAID setup, can be slow or entirely fail like any other disk. As is the case with other hardware, you don’t want to cheap out on your storage. Simply having an SSD in a server doesn’t ensure your sites will be faster or more reliable.
The challenge of reliable SSD Servers
The challenge of offering solid-state storage is getting both fast and reliable – and without (entirely) breaking the bank.
Web hosts are increasingly adopting SSD storage in their hosting infrastructures, but they do so with desktop-grade SSD. And desktop-grade SSDs, like desktop-grade SATA hard drives, fail too easily and too often.
Enterprise-grade SAS SSDs are still prohibitively expensive for most hosting providers. So before signing up with a new host, or “upgrading” to an SSD plan, find out what’s exactly is being used. Then research it, to see if it’s a quality enterprise-grade SSD. You don’t want to go with a provider that resorts to cheap failure-prone consumer SATA SSDs.
Golden Rule of Storage
Fast, cheap, reliable and you can ONLY pick two!
- Fast & Reliable, won’t be cheap
- Fast & Cheap, won’t be reliable
- Reliable & Cheap, won’t be fast
While desktop-grade SATA can suffice for certain types of storage servers, SSD technology is very erratic. The disks are faster, and cheaper, but tend to fail miserably within a short time if they’re under extreme load.
There’s simply no escaping the golden rule of storage!
Why enterprise-grade SSD drives are better
A quality enterprise-grade SSD is not only much faster than most consumer SATA SSD’s, but also feature up to 100x better lifetime reads and writes.
It’s an ideal storage for heavy mission-critical databases, and effectively removing any disk subsystem bottleneck and chance of unexpected data loss.
What SSD storage is Fast Web offering
Fast Web is only offering enterprise-grade SAS SSD storage in all of our hosting packages. These disks are 4X the cost of even high-end consumer-grade drives (And if you ever wonder why we can’t and don’t offer “unlimited” storage, this is why).
Looking for an SSD hosting solution with zero compromises? Go pick your fast web hosting package today!