Do you feel the need for speed and use SSD hosting?

[goodroi]

I would guess that many of us don't worry about our hosting on our regular basis. Maybe you set it up many years ago and only think about it when the credit card is automatically rebilled. Now that many hosting companies offer SSD hosting, I am curious how many people have switched their old sites from HDD hosting to SSD hosting.

We know Google likes speedy sites and more importantly our users like speedy sites. Do you think it is worth it to switch to a hosting package with SSD servers? Is the cost worth it? Do you have a better way to make sites speedy for Google & users?

[Atomic]

Do you have a better way to make sites speedy for Google & users?

There are soooooo many.

Limit requests
Compress images
Asynchronously load everything you can(or defer)
Cache
CDN
Reduce redirects
Minify HTML, Javascript, CSS
Enable compression

And so many more things I would do before thinking about SSD hosting.

[aristotle]

goodroi -- About three years ago my main hosting company replaced all of their old servers with new SSD servers. Since then my sites on those new servers have not only been noticeably faster but also have experienced very little downtime. So the advantage isn't just with speed but also with reliability.

The fees for their shared hosting didn't change when they switched to SSD servers, so that hasn't been an issue.

Atomic -- I agree that you should use other methods to increase a site's speed. But I don't see that as a valid reason not to switch a site to SSD hosting.

[EditorialGuy]

Do you have a better way to make sites speedy for Google & users?

We use CloudFlare, a content delivery network. Since even our HTML pages are static, nearly everything is cached and served from the CloudFlare POP closest to the user's location. Result: Reduced latency, faster loading of pages, and minimal reliance on the origin server. (As a bonus, a good CDN can offer other bells and whistles to speed up real and perceived loading of pages.)

[aristotle]

To return to the original topic, I recently came across a case of a hosting company mentioning SSD servers on their sales pages, but on closer look I got the impression they were referring to some kind of hybrid arrangement that is only partly SSD. So if you're shopping for SSD hosting, you might need to be careful.

[iamlost]

I use managed dedicated servers so somewhat different than a hosted situation but I switched to the new AMD Epyc CPU and enterprise SSD drives and the difference in performance has been significant. I'm not sure how much is due to which but I've been impressed.

[Swanny007]

I've been on an SSD VPS for a number of years now. To be honest I didn't notice that big of an increase in performance after making the switch from non-SSD VPS. Now I'm on Cloudflare so I think the SSD point in my situation is moot.