Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard disks at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as one single unit where information is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives is identical all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ based on the particular setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Website Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended 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 data located on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the info which will be cloned 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 every single file properly and to validate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content you upload to your website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is duplicated to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID fails as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a disk drive stops functioning, the system could switch to a different one promptly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server use extremely fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your sites substantially. The disk drives function 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 take advantage of multiple drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the content without loss if a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, the info will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this particular setup your information will always be safe since it will be available on a lot of drives.