RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all of 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, and many others. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the information which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to confirm the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information you upload to your cloud website hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is copied to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops working, the system can switch to another one promptly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS
The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we create virtual private servers function in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the information which will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the right data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unpredicted hardware malfunction.