Have you ever visited an online store and felt like you were waiting for an eternity for the images to load?
For your own website, it's crucial that you minimize your initial loading times so that impatient visitors don't leave your site. While you can increase storage space, bandwidth, and RAM, that sometimes might not be enough. How fast your hard drive can actually access its memory can be the key to increasing your website speed.
What is SSD Hosting?
SSD stands for Solid State Drive, and it's the next-generation alternative to HDDs, or Hard Disk Drives for storage. The best way to understand how Solid State Drives work would be compare how it DOESN'T work like a traditional Hard Disk Drive.
Hard Disk Drives store information on rotating disks. When a visitor enters a website, a moving arm with a read and write head is used to access the data stored in the disks. The reason why visitors would see a delay when the webpage is loading is because it takes time to move the head to access information.
Traditional HDDs with read and write head[/caption]
On the other hand, a Solid State Drive has no mechanical moving parts, and instead uses microchips. What this means is that SSDs can read and write data almost instantly, so initial load times of your website will be significantly faster than with HDD storage. SSDs typically perform up to 30 times faster than HDD storage. Other handy benefits include more reliability and stability of performance because of the sturdier construction.
Is SSD hosting right for you?
SSD hosting is moving towards becoming the new industry standard because of its efficiency, reliability, and speed. However, one factor you may need to consider before making the switch is the price tag. SSD hosting is traditionally more expensive than hosting with other storage methods.
However, if your website is heavy in graphics, content, or database-heavy applications, it would be well worth the investment to switch to SSDs. Imagine one of your potential customers at the checkout of your online store, waiting to see if the transaction went through. The last thing you want is a confused customer that thinks your site is unreliable or difficult to use. It would be valuable to have quick load times to make sure your visitors are relaxed, happy, and willing to stay on your site!
Another factor to consider would be that typically, SSD hosting plans will have a cap on storage space because storage is more costly with SSD hosting. Because of this, consider how much storage space you'll actually use. If you don't think you'll exceed the given cap limit, don't compromise your speed and performance for storage space that you don't need.
SSD hosting is becoming more popular but is currently offered only as a premium service by most hosting providers. Right now at Doteasy, we want our clients to be able to experience the high performance of SSD hosting without having to take a blow to their wallets. The future is moving towards SSD hosting, so why not get ahead of the game? We're offering complete SSD hosting for our shared hosting plans at only $5.75/month for the first year (with renewal rates as low as $13.95/month only). If you have any questions, we're here to answer them! Drop us a line in the comments or contact our customer support!