RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data saved on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to validate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info which you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is cloned to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID stops working since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one right away without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server use quick NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The drives operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the content without loss in case a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, your data will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your website content all the time. With this configuration your data will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.