RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into separate ones via virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same data is kept on all the drives and the key advantage of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can differ.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information you upload to your cloud hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content you upload will be held on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one right away without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ high-speed NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites substantially. The drives work in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with multiple drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the site content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. In case 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's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this particular setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on multiple disk drives.