RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all 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, etc. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
All content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites inside 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 type of RAID, at least one of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops working 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 if a drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one right away without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we create VPS server employ extremely fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites significantly. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use multiple drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the content without any loss in the event a main drive stops working. In case you pick our backup service, the information will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on several drives.