SSD vs HDD for VPS server?

I'm thinking of buying an extra VPS server but wanted to know which type of hard disk would be best suited for a shared server environment for many websites with high traffic and requiring high CPU/memory. Does HDD still work? and using HDD might down price for my VPS plan, right?

SSD is always better in terms of performance and reliability. HDD is a good choice if you need large amount of storage i.e 200GB + and will be much cheaper than an SSD powered VPS.

TheCompWiz said:

I'm thinking of buying an extra VPS server but wanted to know which type of hard disk would be best suited for a shared server environment for many websites with high traffic and requiring high CPU/memory. Does HDD still work? and using HDD might down price for my VPS plan, right?

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For web hosting (WordPress, eCommerce, cPanel, Plesk), you should choose VPS with SSD, because it will be really slower with an HDD.
But if you need a lot of storage, you can look for a VPS with HDD, but only to store content.

I always look for SSD or SSD cached backed storage. The one part of hosting folks overlook is backups. The speed of backup processes is also important. Fast you can backup the server data the better - hence SSD

Based on what I have seen there is not a huge difference in price between traditional HDD VPS service and SSD VPS service so I wouldn't do it based on price unless you are find an extremely cheap price for the HDD and need a lot of space for your sites.

I personally would rather pay a little more and get the SSD but then again I am one who likes speed.

eva2000 said:

I always look for SSD or SSD cached backed storage. The one part of hosting folks overlook is backups. The speed of backup processes is also important. Fast you can backup the server data the better - hence SSD

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This is the first time I have ever heard of SSD cached, it is just used for backing up data?

VirtuBox said:

For web hosting (WordPress, eCommerce, cPanel, Plesk), you should choose VPS with SSD, because it will be really slower with an HDD.
But if you need a lot of storage, you can look for a VPS with HDD, but only to store content.

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It is not clear why some web hosts are still offering hosting plans with HDD while it is being used as a backup disk.

TheCompWiz said:

This is the first time I have ever heard of SSD cached, it is just used for backing up data?

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it's basically using SATA/SAS disks for storage via hardware raid controller with a read and maybe write cache on fast SSD disk. LSI MegaRaid CacheCade is one such tech https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/wiki/MegaRAID_CacheCade_SSD_Cache as is Adaptec MaxCache

• One or more SSDs will be connected to the RAID controller in addition to the normal hard disks, when using CacheCade.
• Thereby, the conventional hard disks operate completely normally in the RAID array (such as, four hard disks in a RAID 5 array).
• Data that is often read from the RAID array is automatically stored on the SSDs ("working data set").
• Data areas that are often read can therefore be read directly from the SSD, which improves read performance.
• The CacheCade content will remain on the SSDs even during a re-boot.

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I don't use SATA for anything anymore. Now I use SSD for sites and SAS for backups.

Honestly speaking, you don't need SSD. If you pick right provider, HDD will be able to solve your issue. We have HP's server with 1 GB array cache and we get around 532 MB/s read/write in our VPS

HyperFilter said:

Agreed, I believe a sort of combination between HDD + SSD caching should be really nice for the hosting business.

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OVH use this combination on their VPS Cloud with Ceph storage (1.6TB of NVMe with 6x600GB SAS), and performances are not really good. That's why they also offer VPS with SSD.

hfav said:

honestly speaking, you don't need ssd. If you pick right provider, hdd will be able to solve your issue. We have hp's server with 1 gb array cache and we get around 532 mb/s read/write in our vps

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You can have good transfer rates with a HDD, but latency is not good, and it can be really slow with several VPS on the same disks.

Guys,

I think we are going to wrong direction.

VirtuBox said:

You can have good transfer rates with a HDD, but latency is not good, and it can be really slow with several VPS on the same disks.

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eva2000 said:

sequential disk speeds is only one factor, cached disks don't do as well as pure ssd for random disk i/o patterns i.e. database usage.

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I'm not saying HDD is better than SSD. Everyone knows SSD is better.

We are just giving suggestion to TheCompWiz, so that he can get betting understanding and make right decision.

TheCompWiz said:

I'm thinking of buying an extra VPS server but wanted to know which type of hard disk would be best suited for a shared server environment for many websites with high traffic and requiring high CPU/memory. Does HDD still work? and using HDD might down price for my VPS plan, right?

Click to expand...

Does TheCompWiz really need SSD?
Few things: Keeping budget in mind

- Did you check your current disk IOPS?
- Did you check current bandwidth utilization?
- Do you have very large Database? Normally you can't have a 500GB database in a regular VPS?
- Are you sharing large files? Normally you can't share too many large files from you VPS. Because of storage limit and bandwidth limit.


Above questions will help you to determine what you need.

Like others have said, it depends. Especially if you're budget constrained, HDD will still be fine. Just use object caching like Redis, memcached or other solutions to reduce database IOPS if your site is database-heavy (which most sites are these days) If you're reselling the resources though, avoid HDD as much as you can.

hfav said:

Does TheCompWiz really need SSD?
Few things: Keeping budget in mind

- Did you check your current disk IOPS?
- Did you check current bandwidth utilization?
- Do you have very large Database? Normally you can't have a 500GB database in a regular VPS?
- Are you sharing large files? Normally you can't share too many large files from you VPS. Because of storage limit and bandwidth limit.


Above questions will help you to determine what you need.

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hmm..I always like choosing SSD but as asked, HDD may be a good choice to cut cost if I don't need the speed.

hfav said:

- Did you check your current disk IOPS?

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What is IOPS?

hfav said:

- Did you check current bandwidth utilization?

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What does it help? and check for what?

hfav said:

- Do you have very large Database? Normally you can't have a 500GB database in a regular VPS?

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No I don't have any large database like that.

hfav said:

- Are you sharing large files? Normally you can't share too many large files from you VPS. Because of storage limit and bandwidth limit.

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No I don't share large files but is this related to SSD or HDD?
I don't understand what you are speaking to.

TheCompWiz said:

What is IOPS?

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Check following two links
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com...ual-machine-iops-throughput-and-disk-latency/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS

TheCompWiz said:

No I don't share large files but is this related to SSD or HDD?

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SSD will be better choice if you are sharing large files and if you have large database.

SSD for small website
HDD for large data websites and day.

Well if you think about it SSD are built for fast transfer and have limited IOP space it can do etc.
If your a hosting company your not going to give an account to some that wants to host.
It would cost them around £70+ for that kinda of space on an SSD.
Where as on a HDD space per GB is a lot lower than SSD per GB so large files are better on HDD then SSD to keep the drive clean and fresh for SSD speeds.

Do that make sence?

When one selects VPS server for storage, there may be a dilemma whether to choose SSD or HDD storage. The wisdom of the webmaster must prevail here, and webmaster must decide whether more storage space is required or performance. If one needs less pricing and more storage cost, then HDD go for HDD. If one want superfast performance and pricing is not a big factor, then SSD is a perfect solution.

You are willing to pay for faster performance
Don't mind limited storage capacity or can work around that
And again I have to mention that SSD data recovery is far more complicated and harder than HDD's.

SSD is definitely the way to go. It's newer technology, it's much faster, and it was a good choice for us. We switched to SSD and never looked back. Nowadays when you have so much competition, and all competitors' websites are super fast, and users are spoiled by fast sites and fast services, and first time visitors can get easily annoyed by a slow moving site, you definitely have to go with the market by having a super fast VPS server. That impacts the speed of your websites too, so think twice before getting an HDD nowadays.

HostXNow said:

I don't use SATA for anything anymore. Now I use SSD for sites and SAS for backups.

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What is SAS?

hfav said:

Honestly speaking, you don't need SSD. If you pick right provider, HDD will be able to solve your issue. We have HP's server with 1 GB array cache and we get around 532 MB/s read/write in our VPS

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Some people said HDD is really bad for website loading. I believe that is true and always to with SSD.