RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard disks that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into individual ones using virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same info is saved on all drives and the main benefit of using such a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can differ.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops working since the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one instantly without service disturbances of any sort. 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 which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS
The physical servers where we generate virtual private server employ super fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites considerably. The drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use a variety of drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you take advantage of our backup service, the info will be saved on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this type of configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.