RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Website Hosting
The drives that we use for storage with our outstanding cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but extremely fast solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you upload to the website hosting account will be saved on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced with no service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a disk drive fails, the system could switch to a different one instantly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which we offer are generated on physical servers that use SSD drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is included in the information copied on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the correct data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will stay online since all the info will still load from at least one more hard drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be stored on standard hard disks that also operate in RAID as we want to make certain that any website content you upload will be risk-free all of the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.