Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disks at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all perform as a single unit where information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives shall be the same all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Website Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced 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 which is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one promptly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with extremely fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The drives work in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the website content without any loss if a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, the data will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although 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 setup your data will always be safe since it will be available on many drives.