RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information located on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information which you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the Internet sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, the data which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the data which is being duplicated is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that our company offers are created on physical servers which use NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the info copied on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the right information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your websites will stay online since all the information will still load from at least one more hard disk. If you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be saved on standard hard drives that also operate in RAID because we want to make certain that any type of website content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Using multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.