RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the data will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed 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. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Hosting
The drives which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you add to the hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without any service interruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives that 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 setup where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a hard drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what data will be copied on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue operating normally and the faulty drive won't have an effect on the proper operation of your sites in any respect. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses special digital identifiers known as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
All virtual private server accounts which our company provides are made on physical servers which use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the info cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your websites will still be online since all the info will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. In case you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be stored on standard hard drives that also work in RAID because we want to make sure that any sort of content you upload will be safe and sound all of the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.