RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of multiple 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. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops working since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which our company offers are created on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is added to the data copied on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the accurate information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will remain online because all the information will still load from at least 1 other hard disk. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be stored on standard hard disks which also work in RAID as we would like to make certain that any sort of content you upload will be protected at all times. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.