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 several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed 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 data saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your shared web hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives that work 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 extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID fails since the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to a different one instantly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the data which will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the required information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unexpected hardware failure.