SSD Drives

[B_M_W]

I want to know more of SSD Drives (Solid State Drive).
I think it will be good for running high-traffic e-commerce web sites.
Any ideas of it?
Simplehelix.com offers it.

[PsiPro]

Eh, at this point they are not cost effective IMHO. Unfortunately people base their hosting choices by looking at the $/GB of space or bandwidth. Its good your actually looking at the technology.

In terms of the user the use of SSD greatly increases the speed of the data access, as the HDD seek is a major time limiting factor in the serving of a webpage. That being said this issue can be mitigated (last paragraph) without the use of SSD.

The second major issue is reliability. Almost all predictions put the theoretical reliability of SSD much higher then traditional disk drives. However SSD is nowhere near as wildly proven as traditional disks. However traditional disks have can have many other issues, some of them predicable, some of them absolutely and wildly unpredictable (head crash being my favorite). If you have a HDD failure on your webserver you can in all probability be royally f'ed. Pardon my french, but its a very very bad situation to be in.

When I started my hosting company I used traditional disk set-ups usually with two 250-500GB HDDs. One for serving the data and one for storing backups. As my busniess expanded I got more servers and experienced my first HDD crash. I spent over 24hrs getting the new configuration running again (and man did it cost me). I had backups of every client from the previous night. So once the new HDD was set-up and installed I could restore the accounts fairly easily.

After that I never used the traditional server again (although I still have some 'legacy' boxes, I am still working on moving some of the more complex sites).

Anyway back to the point, SSD vs. traditional HDD...

You can get much better speed results and reliability by upgrading the HDD set-ups. I typically use 15k drives in a RAID10 configuration. This provides increased bandwidth and seek speed, making it typically a slower process in the serving of a website. This set-up makes a HDD crash resulting in loss of data extremely, extremely rare.

The point:
Anyway, its a cost benefit issue. SSD eliminates many commonly crash issues, but a crash is still possible, and because of the cost of SSD many hosts may not employ a mirrored raid type approach. with a good traditional set-up you can frequently get decent speed, better reliability, and usually a better price.

[B_M_W]

Thanks for such a details reply, dude.

[PsiPro]

This article just made /.

Slashdot Hardware Story | Why Hard Disk Is a Better Bargain Than SSD

Defiantly relevant.

EDIT: Make sure you skim the comments, some very smart people there but also some very disturbed people. Make sure you skim them, reading comments on /. rots your brain

[fineUK]

Anyway offering SSD, simplehelix.com is trying to offer something new and improved for their clients.
I think of testing it to get to know more of that.

[GUN]

Think package plans which simplehelix.com provides are great for medium and high traffic web sites. Prices are average taking into consideration the amount of resources they offer.
Magento is well-supported on their servers.

[bud_dy]

How much does simplehelix SSD hosting cost?
How much disk space and bandwidth do they provide?
Are there any discount on them?

[PsiPro]

How much does simplehelix SSD hosting cost?
How much disk space and bandwidth do they provide?
Are there any discount on them?

Its in big bold letters on their website. Starts at $100/month

[audi]

Think $100 per simplehelix SSD hosting is an average rate taking into account the amount of resources they offer.
Discount ... well I have found one - DISCOUNT10.
It's a 10% discount on their services.