100% SSD hosting for all customers
Last weekend, we removed the final spinning disk from our hosting servers. We now use only solid state drives (SSDs) in the RAID arrays of all our web, database, and mail servers. This applies both to new accounts and to every existing account (unlike many companies advertising SSD hosting, who only do it for new accounts).
Most customers won’t notice any change recently, because we’ve been working on this project for a long time. We finished converting all MySQL database storage arrays to SSDs around a year ago, and many of our hosting and e-mail servers have used only SSDs for several months. But at some point, all sites hosted with us have gotten noticeably faster.
Using SSDs instead of spinning disks makes a big difference for shared hosting. It removes almost all cases of “latency”, which is when a script, database or mail program has to first wait for another site’s data to be read or written. For hosting servers, the drive access pattern consists of lots and lots of small operations scattered around the drives, requiring high IOPS. On spinning mechanical disks, this means waiting for the disk head assembly to move to the right place for each new file, during which time it can’t do anything useful. With SSDs, that “seek time” is completely eliminated, making the drives hundreds of times faster at small reads and writes. Hard disk seeks were once the main cause of delays and load on our servers, but that’s been almost completely eliminated. WordPress sites run faster, database writes finish more quickly, and mail loads without any delays.
Large SSDs aren’t cheap — they currently cost about the same per GB as hard drives did in 2008, and we’re storing more than ten times as much data per customer as we did then — but the result is worth it. We’re proud to offer high performance hosting to everyone.
