RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on multiple hard drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. In either case, the same info is stored on all the drives and the key advantage of using such a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.
RAID in Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information stored 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 after we replace the malfunctioning one, the data that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining 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 properly and to verify the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info that you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is replaced, the information which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers which employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the info 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 failed drive so that the correct info is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your sites will stay online since all the info will still load from at least 1 more drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be kept on standard disk drives that also work in RAID because we would like to make certain that any sort of site content you add will be risk-free all of the time. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.