RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives that function together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. In any case, the same info is saved on all drives and the basic benefit of using this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard 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's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID breaks down since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops working, the system could switch to another one quickly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which we offer are generated on physical servers which use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is included in the information duplicated on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the accurate info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will stay online because all the information will still load from at least 1 other drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the info will be kept on standard hard disks which also operate in RAID because we would like to make sure that any type of site content you upload will be safe and sound all the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.