RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types depending on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the data which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to validate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info that you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID breaks down because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one immediately without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
In case you take advantage of one of our virtual private server solutions, any content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the defective one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use conventional hard disk drives which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you include this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.