RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the 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, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The disk drives which we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but quick NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed without any service interruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever need to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system can switch to another one quickly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server use high-speed NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The hard drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you choose our backup service, the info will be saved on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content all of the time. With this type of setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of drives.