RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the data will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The disk drives that we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we use. Any content that you add to the cloud website hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced with no service interruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about losing any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a problematic disk is replaced, the data which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your data is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which our company provides are made on physical servers that employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is included in the data copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the correct data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will stay online since all the data will still load from at least one other disk drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be kept on standard disk drives that also operate in RAID as we would like to make sure that any website content you add will be risk-free at all times. Employing multiple hard disks in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.