RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all 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 could differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data kept on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information you upload to your website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives which are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data copied on such a hard drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what data will be duplicated on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the faulty drive won't have an effect on the proper operation of your sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses specific digital identifiers known as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with high-speed NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your websites considerably. The drives work in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of many different drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without any loss if a main drive fails. If you choose our backup service, the info will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this kind of configuration your information will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of drives.