RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives at the same time, 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 vary.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info saved on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your cloud website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a brand new drive if one of the disks in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive fails, the system can switch to another one promptly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS
The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The disk drives operate in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use a variety of drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. If you choose our backup service, your info will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this type of configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on multiple drives.