Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all work as just a single unit where data is kept. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives is the same at all times, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary depending on the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info located on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the data that will be duplicated 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 elements of each file properly and to confirm the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info that you upload to your shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops working since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a disk drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one immediately without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that we offer are made on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one additional bit is added to the information cloned on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the correct information is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will remain online as all the information will still load from at least one other disk drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be saved on standard hard drives that also function in RAID since we want to make certain that any site content you add will be protected at all times. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.