Los Angeles: Web Hosting provider Dreamhost has announced that it has deployed SSD Technology to Dreampress 2, its premium managed WordPress solution. The use of Solid State Drive (SSD) greatly enhances the speed of applications deployed on it.
SSD is a data storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently. SSDs have no moving (mechanical) components. This distinguishes them from traditional electromechanical magnetic disks such as hard disk drives (HDDs) or floppy disks, which contain spinning disks and movable read/write heads. As SSDs do not need to spin or seek to locate data, they may prove vastly superior to HDDs in such tests.
SSDs first made their appearance to customers in Q4 of 2014 in DreamHost’s Virtual Private Servers. Overnight, VPS customers saw an immediate and unasked-for 20x increase in speed when accessing their data.
More recently, in Q1 of 2015, SSDs made their way to DreamHost’s shared hosting. DreamPress 2 users may now also elect to run WordPress on PHP 5.5 with OPCache enabled or, optionally, on Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM,) the drop-in PHP replacement built for extreme performance.
Compared with traditional Hard Disks, SSDs are typically more resistant to physical shock, run silently, have lower access time, and less latency. Most of the advantages of solid-state drives over traditional hard drives are due to their ability to access data completely electronically instead of electromechanically, resulting in superior transfer speeds and mechanical ruggedness.