RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the data that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info which you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done in order to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that our company offers are created on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the info duplicated on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the right data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will remain online as all the info will still load from at least 1 more hard drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be kept on standard hard disks that also function in RAID because we would like to make sure that any type of site content you upload will be safe and sound at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.