RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the 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 in the event that a disk drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we set up VPS servers function in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive fails, it is replaced and the info that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the correct info is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unforeseen hardware failure.