RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on multiple hard disk drives which operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is split into separate ones using virtualization software. In any case, identical data is stored on all drives and the basic advantage of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disk drives work together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, therefore nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your information in addition to the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops working since the website 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 that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which we provide are made on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the data duplicated on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will stay online as all the data will still load from at least 1 more disk drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be stored on standard disk drives which also work in RAID as we would like to make sure that any content you add will be risk-free all the time. Employing multiple hard disks in RAID for all main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.