Best SSD Web Hosting — Top Plans for VPS, Dedicated Server, and WordPress
When I decided it was finally time (past time, actually) to switch my hosting plan to something better, there was one specific feature I wanted — SSDs. My sites were crawling along painfully slowly, and I’d had enough.
We write plenty about how speed sells and performance is pivotal, but I wasn’t practicing what I preached. I had prioritized price over performance when shopping for my last hosting plan and wanted more for my modest collection of websites.
SSDs, which stand for solid-state drives, are an improved type of storage device that copies, writes, and opens files many times faster than traditional hard disk drives, or HDDs. As the name implies, SSDs contain no moving parts; data is stored in flash-memory microchips, meaning the drives draw less power, create less noise, generate less heat, and last much longer than HDDs. SSDs have also evolved more over the years, with NVMe SSD storage emerging as the standard for many web hosting companies. The NVMe drive reads and seeks data far faster than traditional SSD storage drives by accessing flash storage via a PCI Express bus and leveraging the interface more efficiently.
Because SSDs are a newer technology (gaining traction and popularity in the early 1990s, as opposed to when HDDs were introduced in the mid-1950s), they are more expensive and typically have less capacity than HDDs. NVMe storage tends to be more expensive than typical SATA SSD drives. This pricing is with good reason as NVMe drives help deliver a high-bandwidth and low-latency user experience.
While that doesn’t directly affect your hosting solution, you’ll understand why plans with SSDs tend to be pricier, come with lower storage limits — and still appeal to more seasoned web hosting customers.
Although I was only looking for a shared hosting plan for my personal sites, I’ve combined my research and experience with the rest of the HostingAdvice team to provide a full menu of options for the various levels of SSD hosting.
Read on to learn about the differences, along with which hosting providers offer the best plans and services, including features such as a free SSL certificate and live chat.
1. Best Cheap SSD Hosting
Who doesn’t want a good deal? Although the biggest gripe about SSDs is the price tag, customers don’t have to break the bank to get a solid SSD shared hosting plan powered by the performant hard drives.
Hosts offering affordable SSD packages show a commitment to user experience by making performance an affordable, attainable goal. Users can get the performance they need to process their data quickly while enjoying hosting essentials, including a free SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, and domain registration, for a low price.
As such, InMotion Hosting leads the way by offering unlimited SSD plans for only slightly more than the bargain-basement web hosting plan offered by HDD-based competitors. Even though plans start around $3 per month, the company doesn’t cut corners: All customers can enjoy unlimited SSD disk space and email, as well as free backups, malware protection, transfers, and a free domain name registration. Users looking for NVMe storage can upgrade from its base shared plan for a couple dollars extra to reap benefits of even faster speeds.
For only pennies more, A2 Hosting maximizes performance by including access to the Cloudflare CDN and an optimized plugin that preconfigures caching and compression options for WordPress and PrestaShop sites. Known for its speed, the company goes a step beyond SSDs with Turbo servers, which use fewer CPU and memory resources. Users also have the option to purchase a hosting plan with NVMe storage included.
2. Best Shared SSD Hosting Solution
Speaking from experience, an SSD drive impacts site performance no matter which level of hosting you’re at. Although price seems to reign supreme at the shared hosting level, more nuanced and experienced customers will understand and seek the value SSDs bring to the user experience.
If you’re looking to build a strong web presence, speed will be a marker for success. Without quality performance, a website can fall flat and make the user experience exhausting for visitors. But fortunately, users can prioritize their budget and performance needs by looking for a shared plan that has SSD storage and other optimization capabilities.
When it comes to speed, look no further than A2 Hosting. The company is known across the industry for going beyond SSD speed to offer Turbo servers and highly tuned configurations that put the pedal to the metal. The Michigan-based host gives customers unlimited hosting plans, high-powered hardware, and a free content delivery network.
Two other favorite shared hosting providers, Bluehost and HostGator, take surprisingly different tracks to SSD shared hosting. The sister companies both offer a comprehensive, hosting service geared toward website owners looking for an easy experience.
But Bluehost recently added SSDs to its infrastructure, while HostGator reserves the upgrades for its WordPress, cloud, and VPS plans.
3. Best SSD cPanel Hosting
One of the most common and, yet, most frequently overlooked, features when it comes to web hosting is the platform that helps users manage all aspects of their hosting account. A control panel can determine the level of simplicity a user finds while maintaining their hosting environment.
Many hosts offer control panel integration with their plans. Users can leverage these interfaces to manage their domains, email accounts, and install applications, among other services. Although cPanel is far and away the most widely used control panel, an SSD hosting provider implements the administrative interface differently.
For example, SiteGround customizes the cPanel portal to maximize simplicity and user-friendliness. We appreciate the reorganization, as well as the added third-party and in-house tools to give customers even more flexibility and functionality when managing their hosting.
On the other hand, we appreciate how InterServer gives users more options for control panels. Depending on your web hosting service and configuration, you can opt to use Plesk, DirectAdmin, or Webuzo. The company’s own management tools offer unique additional features such as reverse DNS, server monitoring, and domain registration.
4. Best SSD WordPress Hosting Providers
We’re hard-pressed to think of a scenario where SSD storage can make more of an impact than when it comes to a WordPress website. The incredibly popular content management system is everywhere, but it can be cumbersome and difficult to host exactly right. SSDs remove some of the computing burdens and free up resources to deliver sites at optimal speed.
Speed has become more important than ever for online content websites. Google now considers a website’s loading speeds as a factor for SEO ranking, which means SSD storage will play a major role in website success. For WordPress users, finding an SSD host with plans optimized for the CMS and that includes top-notch speed won’t be too difficult.
A2 Hosting offers tons of avenues for speed and even more so with the company’s proprietary Turbo servers, which provide a drop-in Apache replacement that loads pages 20 times faster and allocates more resources toward each user. Users can leverage these Turbo servers within both its WordPress and WooCommerce hosting plans. A2 Hosting has also upgraded its managed WordPress plans to include NVMe storage for faster speed.
As far as WordPress hosting providers go, SiteGround’s managed WordPress hosting and WooCommerce hosting packages supply users with all they need to set up a site, with tons of essentials and extra perks. In addition to HostingAdvice experts, SiteGround gets another stamp of approval from the WordPress Core team for offering managed updates, a one-of-a-kind staging environment, three levels of caching, and Git integration.
5. Best SSD Cloud Hosting
A cousin to VPS hosting, cloud plans offer more responsive computing resources. When combined with SSD performance, cloud hosting offers increased stability, speed, and scalability.
For many of the same reasons as in the VPS section, we recommend InMotion Hosting for a cloud server, as well. The company’s cloud-powered infrastructure is built for real-time redundancy, live-state snapshots, and high availability. InMotion Hosting also offers stellar support via live chat, phone, and email for any technical assistance.
Liquid Web serves a refined palate of cloud hosting options, ranging from VPS or dedicated resources to the all-inclusive CloudSites platform — all managed by people the company calls “the most helpful humans in hosting.” Liquid Web leads the way in speed and customer loyalty and includes enhanced tools for security, CDN, DDoS protection, and backups. Daily billing means customers pay only for the computing resources used.
6. Best SSD VPS Hosting
If you’re not quite ready for a dedicated server but still need a ton of computing power, storage, and bandwidth, a VPS hosting plan using SSDs will do the trick. The performant hard drives are a great addition for organizations needing a hosting plan that can rise to the challenge.
InMotion Hosting includes SSDs in all plans, but we’re particularly fond of the provider’s managed VPS server. For an affordable rate, InMotion Hosting packs an abundance of features into making customer sites and applications hum along 20 times faster than those on HDD hosting.
We appreciate the high levels of RAM and bandwidth the company allocates to virtual private server customers, in addition to free SSD server management, live-state snapshots, and the company’s 90-day money-back guarantee. InMotion Hosting’s base plan with SSD storage starts at $19.99 per month. But users seeking NVMe SSD storage will need to upgrade to a higher tier to enjoy the higher performance.
7. Best SSD Dedicated Server Hosting
If you’re already forking over the dough for dedicated hosting, finding a provider with SSDs will boost performance without much noticeable change in cost.
Frankly, if a dedicated plan is still using HDDs, it probably isn’t worth having unless you have massive databases of information. Regardless, your site or application needs performant infrastructure, so why not get the best?
Fortunately, many of our favorite hosts include SSDs as standard components of their dedicated servers. In fact, Liquid Web offers custom configurations around its SSDs, along with instant provisioning and automated migrations, backups, and monitoring.
At the other end of the spectrum, InterServer is a great choice for those who appreciate a host that operates its own datacenters. The hosting company’s hands-on approach bodes well for customers, who can choose from a surprisingly affordable dedicated server for $70.00 per month to a configuration including up to 2TB of SSD storage.
8. Best SSD Reseller Hosting
If you’ve got an entrepreneurial itch, reseller hosting is a quick, affordable way to pocket a few extra bucks. Resellers typically use a VPS plan acquired at wholesale rates and sublease the unused server space to others.
White-labeled accounts mean resellers can conduct business under their own brand; the web hosting provider maintains the infrastructure, but resellers run the business and are responsible for customer support and invoicing.
SSDs are just one of several perks InMotion Hosting offers to resellers. In addition to unlimited websites and cPanel licenses, InMotion includes the WHMCS billing software for free to organize user accounts and payments. Resellers can even enable their customers to register domains through an included eNom domain reseller license.
What is NVMe Hosting?
SSDs have two main protocols: SATA and NVMe. Serial ATA technology (SATA) entered the SSD drive market in 2001. It was a step up from the existing Parallel ATA protocol that had issues concerning cable size, cost, performance, and functionality. SATA SSDs were also an improvement compared to HDDs as it could reach performance limits that HDDs couldn’t. SATAs have the capability to reach write speeds of 550 MB/s, but HDDs can only achieve 50-120 MB/s in write performance.
But as technology advanced, a better form of SSD drives introduced itself. Non-volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSDs first entered the market in 2011 to address the issues of the SATA bus and interface. NVMe SSDs use the PCIe bus to communicate between the storage interface and the CPU for optimal performance. What sets NVMes apart from other SSD server types is that it leverages the interface in an optimized way and can process more information because of it.
Web hosts that build their platforms with NVMe hosting in mind will definitely deliver unmatched speeds and performance to their users. NVMes allow users to have a longer-lasting product and less latency issues. Because of its upgraded interface, users can leverage four times faster read speeds and 10 times faster seek speeds to boost their online presence experience.
What Are the Benefits of SSD Hosting?
The most obvious and direct benefit of using a hosting plan with SSDs is that it can significantly improve your website’s performance. SSDs (particularly NVMe SSDs) blow HDDs out of the water regarding read/write speeds.
Your website’s speed matters because users prefer sites with fast page load times. In fact, research shows that 40% of site visitors will leave if the page takes more than two to three seconds to load.
SSDs are also less prone to breaking than HDDs because they don’t have any moving parts. That may not matter to you as a hosting customer, but your hosting provider certainly benefits from the increased durability — no company likes replacing parts frequently.
The History Behind SSDs
The first SSD made its debut in 1991. It was a 20MB SSD that had a price tag of $1,000. Fortunately over the years, SSD pricing leveled as more people adopted it and understood its importance. Solid-state drives play a significant role in system performance. Read/write speeds can heavily affect user experience on the frontend since data transfer influences loading speeds of web content.
But before there were SSDs, hosting companies relied on hard disk drives. Traditional hard disk drives had several drawbacks and operating issues that made them ineffective in accelerating performance, which is why the market adopted SSDs. Its internal makeup is different from that of an SSD as it uses spinners, or magnetic platters spinning at high speeds to drive performance. Spinners weren’t reliable and efficient enough to handle information at high rates.
SSDs solved the operating issues that HDDs had by leveraging flash memory to store data, eliminating drive dependence on moving parts. Its built-in technology improves read/write speeds and allows systems to store data for a longer duration. And SSDs don’t need an additional power source to maintain an electrical current into the device to preserve data. Companies can now use an SSD hosting server to create a more reliable environment for users without worrying about slow speeds and operating issues of HDD hosting.
SSD Hosting Powers Sites Worldwide
Storage drives have helped push the envelope on the level of performance users receive for years. Hosting services leveraged SSDs to increase site speed and data transfer rates and elevate performance capability in a way HDDs couldn’t. But as the SSD market shifts to NVMe storage, more users will demand its faster speeds. Just as SSDs have replaced HDDs, NVMe SSD storage will soon become the new standard and dominate the SSD market.
Fortunately, companies around the world are opting to deploy SSDs, both SATA and NVMe, in increasing numbers to reach more people more quickly, giving users flexibility in price and performance. More and more hosting services have adopted NVMe SSD storage into their hosting plans at affordable prices.
Beyond the type of hard drive, hosting customers can further boost their site’s speed or performance by selecting a provider that operates a datacenter where the bulk of your traffic comes from. Content delivery networks help, but nothing beats a nearby datacenter that can quickly provide your users information without having to request the data from thousands of miles away.
Milliseconds matter and speed sells, so finding the best SSD hosting nearby will spell success for your online endeavors. Happy hosting!