SA data centres are moving to SSDs

[Bryn]

It isn't about how many there are. It's about one easily having the space requirement of thousands of small ones. HDD is under R0.50/GB now. SSD is easily 4 times that, actually more if you consider prices are near linear and you don't get volume discount. Hosting providers aren't going to pass on the benefits of SSD without also passing the extra cost either in price or less storage space.

It really doesn't matter how big a site is - if it's a customer-facing entity it needs to be on SSD.

When it comes to restrictions that make SSD unfeasible, then there is an element that isn't being handled correctly. For example, almost any decent online store with hundreds of thousands of product images serves them from Amazon S3.

It's unthinkable to have hard drive web hosting for a 'normal' website.

 

[Swa]

It really doesn't matter how big a site is - if it's a customer-facing entity it needs to be on SSD.

When it comes to restrictions that make SSD unfeasible, then there is an element that isn't being handled correctly. For example, almost any decent online store with hundreds of thousands of product images serves them from Amazon S3.

It's unthinkable to have hard drive web hosting for a 'normal' website.

Let's just agree to disagree on this. For me it's not feasible for every site to be on SSD purely because of the cost and nothing else. For companies like MS that make their money from elsewhere perhaps but certainly not when you make your money from what you're hosting.

 

[Mr Scratch]

forget ssd vs hdd

now its sata v nvme lmfao - ZFS RAID0 10 NVME disks w/ a RAM ARC cache or go bust /s

 

[Johnatan56]

Let's just agree to disagree on this. For me it's not feasible for every site to be on SSD purely because of the cost and nothing else. For companies like MS that make their money from elsewhere perhaps but certainly not when you make your money from what you're hosting.

Every site or a vast majority of sites? The part of the site that's small that can be quickly accessed should pretty much always be on an SSD, file store stuff can be hosted on a HDD. I still don't get your argument, the price difference to SSD is not that large. Most providers don't even offer non-SSD storage in South Africa for normal web hosting, Hetzner was one of the last larger players to move over (I'm unsure about Afrihost).

 

[Swa]

Every site or a vast majority of sites? The part of the site that's small that can be quickly accessed should pretty much always be on an SSD, file store stuff can be hosted on a HDD. I still don't get your argument, the price difference to SSD is not that large. Most providers don't even offer non-SSD storage in South Africa for normal web hosting, Hetzner was one of the last larger players to move over (I'm unsure about Afrihost).

And there's the thing, normal hosting may make up the majority of sites simply because of the small size of most sites but not the majority of data. It's not sites that count but the amount of data. Large sites would take up a substantial amount of space if not the majority. It's this part that you ignore.

Yes SSD is still pretty expensive. We haven't even reached 500GB price parity yet. Looking at 1TB it's 4x as expensive. I think the sweetspot for HDD is now 4-6TB which would put SSD at 6x-8x times as expensive. I can't see a site that needs to host 100's of TB just moving over to SSD.

I never made the argument that some data shouldn't be served from SSD but consider this. If you have a few GB (actually much less for most sites of which some is dynamically generated as well) frequently accessed data vs TB's on storage does it really make much sense to differentiate or rather cache all frequently accessed data no matter the source?

 

[Wasabee!]

SSD's are better for day to day use/boot devices than trad HDD. So long as perf over capacity is a priority.

For long term permanent storage...HDD technology is still better (less risk of data loss/corruption) and cheaper( though slower)

Aktually I run tape drives in raid. Best of both worlds.

 

[Bryn]

Let's just agree to disagree on this. For me it's not feasible for every site to be on SSD purely because of the cost and nothing else. For companies like MS that make their money from elsewhere perhaps but certainly not when you make your money from what you're hosting.

But my whole point was that if you're hosting hundreds or thousands of gigs on the main web server, that that would be appalling. Any site with special considerations regarding its size should be hosting its data-heavy content on a separate domain.

It's really not optional, as not doing so heavily screws with your ability to create staging environments, to ensure High Availability, to manage backups efficiently and without wasting terabytes of space etc. It's a disaster to have it all in one place.

And what we're talking about, which is any core website, should never, under any circumstances, not be hosted on SSD storage.

And even then, if anything loads slowly then there is no acceptable excuse. You do whatever needs to be done to ensure top-notch performance.

You make it sound like sites with large amounts of data are a special enterprise thing that only the big boys have the skills to deal with. But I can assure you that the online stores of SMEs are one of the most common gigs outsourced by creative agencies, and many have hundreds of thousands of products that sync automatically from various distributors. Dealing with large amounts of data shouldn't be an issue for any half-decent web developer.

 

[Swa]

But my whole point was that if you're hosting hundreds or thousands of gigs on the main web server, that that would be appalling. Any site with special considerations regarding its size should be hosting its data-heavy content on a separate domain.

It's really not optional, as not doing so heavily screws with your ability to create staging environments, to ensure High Availability, to manage backups efficiently and without wasting terabytes of space etc. It's a disaster to have it all in one place.

And what we're talking about, which is any core website, should never, under any circumstances, not be hosted on SSD storage.

And even then, if anything loads slowly then there is no acceptable excuse. You do whatever needs to be done to ensure top-notch performance.

You make it sound like sites with large amounts of data are a special enterprise thing that only the big boys have the skills to deal with. But I can assure you that the online stores of SMEs are one of the most common gigs outsourced by creative agencies, and many have hundreds of thousands of products that sync automatically from various distributors. Dealing with large amounts of data shouldn't be an issue for any half-decent web developer.

What do you mean? There's no reason to move data to a separate domain or server. That simply increases costs as well. The issue is with management and not where it's located and with SSD vs HDD there's already a measure of separation.

I feel like we're going in circles here. The original goal was that everything should be on SSD and not about which parts of a website should be. I pointed this out as being unfeasible. You keep referring to the amount of websites but don't address my point that even a single site with large amounts of data can dwarf thousands of them. There is still a big place for HDD as the main storage.

Shared hosting is in any case irrelevant here as those services do not allow content hosting so they essentially provision on a zero space requirement and tell us nothing about the size of the SSDs installed.

 

[Mr Scratch]

aws buckets!

 

[Bryn]

What do you mean? There's no reason to move data to a separate domain or server. That simply increases costs as well. The issue is with management and not where it's located and with SSD vs HDD there's already a measure of separation.

I feel like we're going in circles here. The original goal was that everything should be on SSD and not about which parts of a website should be. I pointed this out as being unfeasible. You keep referring to the amount of websites but don't address my point that even a single site with large amounts of data can dwarf thousands of them. There is still a big place for HDD as the main storage.

Shared hosting is in any case irrelevant here as those services do not allow content hosting so they essentially provision on a zero space requirement and tell us nothing about the size of the SSDs installed.

I was specifically addressing two points:
1) That a website can still be hosted on hard drives in 2020
2) That the entirety of a large site should be stored as one

Both points are an emphatic no.

For (1), there is just no justification given the marginal difference in cost and the huge difference in performance. When discounting for the size of media and general user file storage, all sites are relatively small.

For (2), it would be crazy bad practice to keep everything together on a big site. For so many reasons:

- Backup sizes would be staggering and backups would take ages to process.
- Ridiculously unnecessary costs due to how much space would be used for even a month of backups.
- Immense waste of server resources processing such files, and unnecessary usage fees.
- Impossible to maintain content/media files separately from website
- Particularly problematic for online stores, where if something goes wrong you need to very quickly merge the database of the most recent backup with the live version. Nobody wants hundreds or thousands of gigs coming along for the ride for absolutely no good reason.
- But seriously, it's the waste of storage space. Instead of 2-4 copies of all media or whatever is taking up space you'll have 30+ copies. Can't imagine anyone wanting to work this way.

There is no opportunity cost to efficiently separating heavy data storage and the core website. So it doesn't make sense to not do so.

aws buckets!

100%. And it's perfectly viable even for middle-of-the-road websites with heavy content thanks to integration with image delivery services like ShortPixel.

 

[Ipwn 4]

You referring to me? If Google Cloud's premium network is too consumer for you, please let me know how you host your sites/applications.

Our "sites" are enterprise applications, think load balanced web servers, SQL clusters and multi TB DBs running in our geo redundant private cloud.

 

[Swa]

I was specifically addressing two points:
1) That a website can still be hosted on hard drives in 2020
2) That the entirety of a large site should be stored as one

Both points are an emphatic no.

For (1), there is just no justification given the marginal difference in cost and the huge difference in performance. When discounting for the size of media and general user file storage, all sites are relatively small.

For (2), it would be crazy bad practice to keep everything together on a big site. For so many reasons:

- Backup sizes would be staggering and backups would take ages to process.
- Ridiculously unnecessary costs due to how much space would be used for even a month of backups.
- Immense waste of server resources processing such files, and unnecessary usage fees.
- Impossible to maintain content/media files separately from website
- Particularly problematic for online stores, where if something goes wrong you need to very quickly merge the database of the most recent backup with the live version. Nobody wants hundreds or thousands of gigs coming along for the ride for absolutely no good reason.
- But seriously, it's the waste of storage space. Instead of 2-4 copies of all media or whatever is taking up space you'll have 30+ copies. Can't imagine anyone wanting to work this way.

There is no opportunity cost to efficiently separating heavy data storage and the core website. So it doesn't make sense to not do so.

I never made point 2. As for point 1 the cost is anything but marginal once you get to a few hundred gigs and is anything from 4x to 8x more. It's blatantly not the case that HDD should not be used and that everything should be on SSD by now.

 

[Bryn]

Our "sites" are enterprise applications, think load balanced web servers, SQL clusters and multi TB DBs running in our geo redundant private cloud.

That stuff is a non-issue with any top cloud provider, and geo-redundancy is baked into any half-decent setup these days. It only takes a few clicks to add Cloudflare Business with Argo, Load Balancing, Rate Limiting etc. for blistering performance, reliability and security.

The simple truth is that hosting is not hard these days. Also, I have yet to run into a giant database that couldn't be dramatically trimmed down.

I never made point 2. As for point 1 the cost is anything but marginal once you get to a few hundred gigs and is anything from 4x to 8x more. It's blatantly not the case that HDD should not be used and that everything should be on SSD by now.

But everything you're saying implies point 2. A website cannot be that large without severely infringing on best practices. Whatever is causing the size to inflate should be compartmentalised and hosted separately. So hard drives CAN be used if there is a server hosting images and video and/or storing backups and whatnot. Animations above the fold and lazy loading images below it will hide slow load times for media anyway.

But any website - the core website - should never be on hard drives. I will proclaim this fact to my death. It is a disaster for performance and would look like amateur hour for any developer.

 

[quovadis]

My 2c. SSD obviously has it's benefits in terms of power consumption, form factor, vibration, IOPs and transfer speeds which is why adoption is increasing in datacenters as the price per GB continues to drop and MTBF/write endurance improves however it will be a long time before mechanical drives disappear especially with large data requirements and the adoption of tiering and various caching technologies. All the other noise in this thread regarding what should or shouldn't be is subjective as every solution is different.

 

[Ipwn 4]

The simple truth is that hosting is not hard these days

Cool

 

[MrGray]

Not sure why people still seem to think that space or reliability is an issue with SSDs. Xneelo, for instance, offer mirrored or raided 1TB SSDs as standard on their self-managed servers for R1600/R2600pm.