Software Development:
Individual Programming

Symptom

You want to speed-up your website and you know SSDs from your computer: That boots much faster than previously when you were still using magnetic hard disks. Files can be read and saved much faster, everything goes swiftly. For that reason you believe that an “SSD hosting plan” will speed-up your website.

Solution

„SSD hosting“ is an invention of clever marketing strategists. The speed of a website almost never depends on the hard disk technology that the web hosting business is using. Real world tests have proven, that website owners cannot tell whether a website runs on SSD or magnetic hard disks. The alleged faster speed is a phantasy, because website owners WANT to believe.

Websites based on SSDs are basically not faster than websites based on conventional hard disks. The reasons for that is that only a tiny fraction of the delivery time needed to transmit a website is used by retrieving data from mass storage. The fraction is so tiny, that it cannot be experienced by users. It cannot even be measured in tests, because other factors have a much greater influence on the delivery speed of a website.

Network bandwidth example: The bandwith that a website owner can use is only a few hundred Mbit/s at many hosting companies. Quality hosting businesses like Bitpalace have their machines linked to the Internet with guaranteed bandwidths, e.g. 1 GBit/s. But even that is much slower than the speed with which SSDs transfer data to the web server. What good is a 6 GBit/s transfer rate from an SSD to the web server if the web server can only forward data to the Internet with 1 GBit/s? Magnetic hard disks achieve much higher transfer rates, too, than what the web server can forward to the Internet. In the real world, the network interface is clocked up – independent from the type of mass storage device – SSD or conventional hard disk – that is being used.

Resource-sharing example: On the host machine, many users share CPU and RAM. For that reason it is essential to have a low process load on the machine and a strong CPU. You also need to have technology in place that enables the web server to render pages fast. This is not done on the hard disk, but in RAM. Even if mass storage is involved, their share is marginal, because most content comes from cache memory.

Bottom line: Faith can move mountains, and customers love to believe that “SSD hosting” speeds up their websites. That is, of course, much easier than to tackle the real reasons for slow websites, such as poorly written software. “SSD hosting” is a great opportunity for providers to ask for more money from their customers for a basically usesless feature. Website owners definitely do not need “SSD hosting”.

Overview of frequently asked questions