RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ multiple 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 the same. This kind of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the 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, and many others. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down since the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk 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 quickly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
In case you employ one of our VPS server plans, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the faulty one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use regular hard disks that function in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.