RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, whether 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 particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information located on the other drives is duplicated 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 once we replace the problematic one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info which you upload to your cloud website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is cloned to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive fails, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS
If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server packages, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any potential for corrupting data during the process is averted. We also use ordinary hard drives that work in RAID for storing backups, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.