RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration 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 fails, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed 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, and so on. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the information that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to validate the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your shared web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is copied to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops working since the 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 stops working, the system can switch to another one immediately without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Hosting
If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server packages, any content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk part of the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the faulty one, the bits of the information that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also employ conventional hard drives which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.