Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where your information is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives is identical at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary based on the particular setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type 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 stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the data that will be copied 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 each file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives which are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on this type of a disk drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what data will be cloned on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive will be accurate. During the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the faulty drive won't impact the normal operation of your Internet sites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses special digital identifiers named checksums to prevent silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ high-speed NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The hard disks work in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. 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 of the data copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without loss in case a main drive fails. If you choose our backup service, your info will be kept on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of drives.