RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Website Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new website hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating effectively until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a problematic disk is replaced, the information which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that your data is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which our company provides are generated on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is included in the data copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the accurate info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your sites will still be online since all the info will still load from at least one other disk drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be saved on standard disk drives which also work in RAID since we would like to make certain that any kind of content you upload will be protected all the time. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.