SSDs: is this safe for hosting?

Heya folks!

I got a notice from one of my hosts this morning(InMotion) that I could get an upgrade to a newly introduced plan for an additional $5 a month. The point of the advertising push is their newly introduced SSD plans. What really interests me with the offer is the quadrupling of the memory, more than doubling of the bandwidth and increase in storage.

What keeps me from accepting, however is the SSD. I’m definitely not up on hardware current events, but the last time I paid any attention, SSD’s weak points were their finite write capabilities. It was considered to be a potential trade-off for people like gamers, but not an option for anyone that considered data retention to be of primary concern.

Is this no longer the case(or was it ever)? Would you trust your sites to a server running SSDs?

Thanks for your thoughts!

SSD degradation has gotten a lot better and shouldn’t be a concern for you, that’s something the host would worry about. It’s a very slow process and they probably still have a RAID 0+1 or RAID 5 setup or whatever fall over they had before. This is also why their ram has quadrupled, so they can reduce their swap files and greatly reduce the read/writes to the disk. You should do this at home if you have one as well.

SSDs increase performance and increase reliability. They are now cheap enough to get good storage at an affordable price. There’s really no reason to not have them on a server or your home computer. I don’t know many good hosts who even offer non-SSD storage on VPSs anymore.

SSDs are getting more reliable each time. They’re not as realiable as a regular hard disk yet but I can tell you that I use a SSD in my tower for the OS and it works like a dream.
They’re much faster and everything loads more quickly.
So I would say, yep, why not?

In this case, I would take into consideration how much I trust my hosting provider and the service that I received from them till now (specially if I had some kind of trouble), the cost itself, my own earnings, how much traffic I’m receiving and things like that.

You still need to do frequent backups of your site and information and databases (if you have them) but you should be doing that anyway.

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That’s really the reason I asked. I don’t want to turn my question into a bad review, so I won’t get all whiny, but I was a customer of IMH when this happened in 2011 and all told, over 30 of our sites and over a hundred index files were borked. The extent of IMH’s reconciliation was to append a numeric string to the end of every index file. No rollbacks, no swaps to backups, absolutely nothing. I spent the next week restoring everything myself.

I’ve still got a VPS with them(I do my own backups :wink: ) and this offer came along, so I thought I’d ask. With the knowledge of how IMH handled the issue linked to above, I trust them to take care of me and my data about as far as I can throw them. If the SSD’s were not considered to be safe to use, I’d pass but with your thoughts on the matter, I think I might go ahead and take the upgrade, if for no other reason than the other increases.

Thanks for your time!

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I was a customer of IMH when this happened in 2011 and all told, over 30 of our sites and over a hundred index files were borked.

That’s a little different I think, I was talking more about them monitoring SSD Degradation. You as a user won’t be effected, your data won’t be lost, the SSD will just perform worse and store less over time.

You should always be doing backups of your own data to protect against total failure.

I haven’t seen too much lately about the degradation of SSD. It is my understanding that if an SSD is rated for 10,000 then you would need to write the entire capacity of the drive every day for 25 years or so to wear out all the cells. That is more than most user would ever encounter. I would say if you have an opportunity to add a SDD then do it.

Thank you all very much for your input. I went ahead and upgraded the hosting package thanks to the community’s input and a little light reading in the interim.

Thank you all very much for helping me edge slightly closer to the 21st century. No more pagers!

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