SSD: Is it worth it really?

[Cambion]

So I am curious if an SSD powered VPS is really doing much difference for me and should I consider a possible downgrade to a Non-SSD plan and save a bit of cash.,

I've been with quite a few hosts and it wasn't until earlier this year, I tried an SSD. My site never felt slow by any means(nor did I get any complaints) but when I moved to my previous host and now my current host, both offered SSD VPS so i said "What the heck? Why not?" and jumped on in.

It's hard to Judge Performance seeing as I've only been back on Xenforo about 10 days since converting from IPB. But i am wondering am I simply paying more for something that really isn't adding much benefit for me other than just having an SSD just because.

Then....I get confused at various terms.
Pure SSD, SSD Cache(which I believe is the same thing as SSD Accelerated) and I am like "what is the difference and which is better?" LOL

 

[Chimpie]

You're not going to go wrong with your SSD from Knownhost. Servers are rock solid and support is lightening fast.

 

[imthebest]

Pure SSD: there are no old, mechanical hard drives on the server.
SSD Cached/SSD Accelerated: the main drives are the classic mech HDDs however SSDs are being used as filesystem cache to improve performance.

If your database is not that big and you have plenty of RAM available you don't need a SSD because almost all your database contents are already cached on the RAM and reads are being done from there, just writes are passing through the HDD. However if you have a really busy forum then even if you have lots of RAM you should use SSDs because on a big board every nanosecond matters!

 

[WSWD]

SSD is generally going to speed things up...database queries, etc. However, drive speed is just like anything else (CPU, RAM, etc.). If disk i/o isn't your limiting factor, you probably aren't going to notice a huge difference. If you're hitting your i/o limitations or running on a really slow disk array, you're most definitely going to notice a difference.

 

[dethfire]

I use SSD for my database and it does improve performance.

 

[HostDash]

If you have a fairly small community and without many other sites hosted on the server then you can probably do without the SSD. Having said that, having an SSD early can prevent you from needing to upgrade to one later on down the line.

I would probably go with the SSD.

 

[x3sphere]

In most cases, I'd upgrade RAM before moving to an SSD.

Any modern OS will cache frequently accessed files in RAM, and if your database also fits in RAM there's really no need for an SSD.

 

[m1ne]

For anything other than a game server, no.

 

[cdub]

I feel the need for speed! Part of me really wants to buy the SSD VPS for my new sites... It's only 15 bucks more a month.

I think I'm going to do it - mainly because I'm hoping for the site to grow quite a bit in the next year or so and I don't want to have to do a switch again.

 

[Wildcat Media]

We host a busy XF on a single dedicated server and, when I spec'ed it out back in 2012, I went with a pair of SSDs--one for web server, the other for MySQL. On our old server, our performance bottleneck was caused by us hitting the I/O limits on our old HDDs. Often the HDD could not keep up with the volume of queries (especially when we used to run vB3.7). Back in our final days of vB3.7 about two years ago (which I had modified for "big board" use, including adding Sphinx), we had at most 750-800 online during peak hours, and we'd really start to feel it. We now can hit as many as 1500 users during peak hours (with XF 1.4) and we do not slow down at all.

 

[m1ne]

I have 7 websites (4 forums, 2 blogs, 1 image host) and a minecraft server running on RAID1 HDD's with 135mbps I/O performance. This workload is handled with ease.
Assuming you are choosing a VPS instead of a dedicated because you feel your site isn't big enough to warrant it, then you don't need an SSD either.