Solid State Drive Hosting Services

My former hosting provider, A2 Hosting, is now offering an SSD hosting service called SwiftServer. (SSDs, or solid-state drives, are much faster counterparts to hard disk drives with no moving parts.) The service includes both shared hosting and VPS plans. It had not previously occurred to me that we would see hosting providers move to SSDs so soon, but that’s the next logical step and it makes perfect sense given the recent steep declines in SSD prices (both in nominal terms and relative to hard disk drive prices).

I migrated to Linode a couple of years ago, but this new service sounds like a great deal if you’re looking to trade off some storage for speed: a virtual private server (VPS) with 10 GB of storage on an SSD for $20 per month.

Their price points for additional storage and memory are also interesting. Most of the time, providers scale up both of these together, along with the price, but with this new service A2 is offering “storage intensive” (100 GB) and “memory intensive” (2 GB) options, which are upgrades in one dimension or the other, but not both.