RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disks which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. In either case, identical data is kept on all drives and the main advantage of using such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs super fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard disk drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, which means that absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of security for your info in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is cloned to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops working since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a drive fails, the system can switch to a different one right away without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which our company offers are made on physical servers which employ NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is included in the info copied on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will still be online since all the data will still load from at least 1 more hard drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be kept on standard disk drives that also work in RAID since we want to make sure that any site content you add will be safe and sound all of the time. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.