RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Website Hosting
The hard disks that we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but quick NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you upload to the website hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced with no service disruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to worry about losing any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a drive fails, the system could switch to another one instantly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which we offer are created on physical servers which employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one additional bit is included in the info cloned on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the correct info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will stay online since all the data will still load from at least one other hard disk. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be kept on standard hard disks which also operate in RAID as we want to make sure that any type of website content you add will be safe and sound all of the time. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.