If you have been watching the Cloud market over the past few years, you have noticed a change in how Cloud Hosting companies market their solutions. Up until roughly 2012, most Cloud hosting companies pushed their SAN storage Cloud architecture however, that changed with the rising of DigitalOcean.
DigitalOcean, founded by Ben Uretsky, Moisery Uretsky, Jeff Carr and Mitch Wainer, upended the market by provided developer focused SSD Cloud hosting deployed and ready to use in less than 55 seconds. More on DigitalOcean in a bit.
With SSD’s taking over the Cloud server hosting world, we are going to use this space to talk about the top SSD Cloud hosting providers in the United States and why you should be looking into their web hosting solutions. Yet, before we can get into hosting company specifics, we want to first touch on what SSD hosting is and why it has taken over the market.
What is SSD Cloud Hosting?
SSD Cloud Hosting, or Solid State Drive Cloud Hosting, is a storage drive developed in the PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect) mold. The basic tenant of a SSD is to provide a storage solution which enables maintain a rapid scratch disk predominantly utilized for the most frequently used data on a server. Essentially, an SSD allows for lightning fast recall and use of always used data.
The major difference between a SAN/NAS/DOS and a SSD server is the SSD is placed directly within the server to cut down on data retrieval/use latency. The major downfall of a SAN storage unit is latency between frequently used data and where that data is recalled from – an external storage array.
Why Has SSD Cloud Hosting Taken Over the Web Hosting Industry?
The answer is speed, performance and uptime consistency. While SAN storage acts as a great storage utility for Cloud based servers, the fact that its recall time of commonly used data – higher latency – cuts down on its general use when accessing heavy data sets. In addition, because SAN storage requires external storage array, the system tends to fail more often than an internal storage platform like solid state drives provide.
The other major reason why SSD servers have taken over the Cloud hosting market is because they are cheaper to operate, rent and maintain than SAN options. One of the major reasons why Digital Ocean (DO) reached their current heights is because using SSD servers allowed their price point to drop to $5 for a single server when the majority of their competition was providing a SAN Cloud server at a $10 – $15 price point with similar server resources (RAM, Bandwidth, Disk, CPU).
For anyone following the industry, once Digital Ocean proved their model in live market conditions, their competition – VPS.net, Solar VPS, Linode etc. – began dropping their prices and revamping their offerings to stay competitive with DO.
Make no mistake about it, the Cloud hosting market shifted to SSD servers as a reaction to the success of DigitalOcean.
This said; let’s chat about why DigitalOcean and a few other Cloud server providers are currently the top SSD server providers in operation.
Digital Ocean: SSD Cloud Hosting at $5 in Under 55 Seconds
The tag line of full selling point tag line of DigitalOcean is:Simple Cloud Hosting, Built for Developers: Deploy an SSD Cloud Server in 55 Seconds
The tag line is deceiving. To the untrained eye, the major selling point is 55 seconds. 55 seconds conveys speed. 55 seconds conveys ease. 55 seconds conveys simplicity. Everyone has 55 seconds. Yet the truth is, the major selling point of the DO tag line is “built for developers”. Before DO, most Cloud hosting companies built and marketed their services for the general market. Rackspace, VPS.net, Linode, Firehost etc. all built their services to sell to the general market – to anyone and everyone who needed web hosting solutions.
This model comes from 1st generation web hosting companies like GoDaddy.
What DO did, which the rest of the industry is still catching up to, is market their solutions to a specific crowd. The founding members of DigitalOcean understood if you can target a single, highly influential market with a reliable, easy to use, lightning fast and affordable product, that community would spread the word through avenues like GitHub, Twitter and Web Hosting Talk.
That is exactly what happened. DigitalOcean built a SSD Cloud server infrastructure sold at $5 per instance (“droplet” in DO language) deployable in under 55 seconds accessible through a clean and easy to use graphic based interface. In short, DigitalOcean built a highly responsive working infrastructure designed to help web developers – i.e. the true weight behind the web industry – build better systems, programs, applications and software.
DO adeptly understood that using an SSD based server, over a SAN storage system, would allow developers to build, create and deploy faster in a more stable environment. This is how the SSD Cloud server took over the industry. Web developers latched on, DO continued their marketing and backend efforts to web developers and more web developers latched on. Continue that cycle ad nauseam.
Currently, DigitalOcean is fifth largest hosting provider in the world surpassing Rackspace in July 2014. Once the new kid on the block, DO is now the block.
So, why should you utilize DigitalOcean as your SSD Cloud hosting platform?
- Price
- Reliability
- Never ending internal resources and community guidance
- Powerful SSD platforms
- Access to web developer tools
- Dead simple API’s
- Dead simple graphic control panels
- Excellent DNS management
- 1-click installs of developer tools like Rails, Docker, Gitlab etc.
- Instance snapshots of “droplets” to build new instances
All this stated, who are a few other SSD cloud providers which are worth their weight in servers?
SSD Cloud Hosting with Linode and Storm on Demand
Linode SSD Cloud Hosting: Dependable, Resource Intensive, Trusted
Serving the web hosting community commendably for the past few years, Linode is a trusted provider of VPS and Cloud hosting solutions. Taking signals from the market, Linode shifted their VPS solutions from SAN based storage to SSD servers within the past year. Coming in at a bit higher introduction price point than DigitalOcean – $10 for a basic SSD Cloud server as opposed to $5 – Linode provides all the resources and development tools DO provides.
With a proven track record, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, comprehensive backups, node balancers and managed Cloud servers, Linode is a proven provider. The major reason you can choose to utilize Linode is because of their proven track record. In terms of automobiles, Linode is Lexus: a very capable, very powerful, somewhat affordable provider with a proven image, track record and ability to take care of their consumers.
You choose Linode because you trust them and know they won’t fail.
Storm on Demand SSD Cloud Hosting: Greater Resource Options, More Choices
On the other hand, you choose Storm on Demand for their breadth of services. Not only offering SSD servers, Storm provides bare metal solutions, private Cloud deployments and their classic Cloud hosting solutions. Storm on Demand, more than Linode or DigitalOcean, is a more traditional web hosting company offering a wider range of solutions to encompass wider needs.
With the increases speed and power of their SSD Cloud servers, Storm on Demand provides a wide range of SSD Cloud server options with varied resources and price points. Storm on Demand SSD Cloud servers vary in price from $35 per month for a 1GB SSD, 1GB RAM, 1 CPU Cloud server to $1,400 per month for a 256GB SD, 244.1GB RAM, 64 CPU server.
As you might have noticed, Storm on Demand provides a wider cross section of web hosting services at a higher monthly cost than both DigitalOcean and Linode. While wholly capable, reliable and useful, Storm on Demand does not cater specifically to a single market. As such, for the company or individual looking for SSD Cloud Hosting which isn’t custom built for web developers, Storm on Demand is your bet.
SSD Cloud Hosting Summary
It makes no sense for us to go out of our way to highlight one company over another when that company doesn’t deserve it. Unlike a lot of other web hosting, colocation and Cloud hosting review sites, we aren’t paid to glowingly review any company or platform. Precisely because we are an independent web hosting provider review platform, you can trust us when we say investing in SSD Cloud servers is a question of investing in DigitalOcean and all the rest.
Sure, Linode, Rackspace, GoGrid and Storm on Demand all provide reliable, useful and powerful SSD server platforms with a ton of add-ons and resources, yet it has to be said, Digital Ocean is just entering their full stride. SSD Cloud hosting is DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is SSD Cloud hosting.
As the company continues to grow, thrive and prosper, it makes no sense looking elsewhere.