SSD Hosting

Before becoming ones of the first providers to offer solid state drive (SSD) hosting, we offered hard disk drive (HDD) hosting. While HDDs use spinning platters with a read/write head on a mechanical arm to record data, SSDs on the other hand use flash memory. SSDs primary speed advantage stems from them containing no moving parts so read and write times are greatly improved. A2 Hosting's SSDs perform thousands of input/output operations every second while standard hard disk drives can only perform hundreds.

Think of an HDD as a record and an SSD as an MP3 player. Imagine you want to listen to a specific song. There really isn't a great way to quickly get to that song on a record player because you have to wait until the arm reaches that song. You can pick up the arm and try to find the location on the record, but it's a slow process. On an MP3 player though, you can quickly move to the desired song with a few clicks of a button. Want to move to another song? Just click the forward and back button a few more times to find it.

Not only do you host your site on our blazing fast SSDs, your account comes backed by our 99.9% Uptime Commitment. That means you can expect ultra-reliable performance!

Have any questions about our SSD Hosting plans? Our 24/7/365 Guru Crew Support team can help! They can tell you all about how you can install the most popular software applications like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla with a single click. Get started now risk free with our Money-Back Guarantee. Your site hosted on our high performance SSDs can be a high-powered combination.

The A2 Hosting SSD Advantage

• Faster Speed - Speed is the obvious advantage of SSD Hosting. According to our speed tests, sites hosted on our SSDs are 300% faster page loads than sites hosted on an HDD.
• Enhanced Reliability - Because SSDs are more efficient in how it handles read/write operations, SSDs are more capable of handing peak use times. SSDs are also more durable because they do not have moving parts so SSDs wear slower than HDDs.
• Environmentally Friendly - Solid state drives use less power than traditional HDDS. As a green hosting provider, that's a plus in our book!

The key to understanding how SSDs make your web site faster is to understand that:

• HDDs feature a spinning platter and an arm (almost like a turntable/record player)
• SSDs are powered by flash memory (microchips)

You also want to remember the storing your site does not store data in a sequential way. Since the data on the server is not in sequential order, an HDDs spinning platter spins to find the piece of data it's looking for, continually rotating as it finds its next piece of data. Obviously this can create bottlenecks because these platters can only spin so fast.

With an SSD, the server can quickly pick and choose the pieces of data it needs because it's powered by flash memory. It isn't relying on a spinning platter and an arm. It doesn't matter that the data is not in sequential order.