RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard disk drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. In any case, identical data is saved on all drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors imply that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can differ.
RAID in Hosting
The cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all hosting accounts are made employs quick NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard disk drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your info together with the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives that are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data cloned on this kind of a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what data will be copied on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the malfunctioning drive will not affect the normal operation of your Internet sites at all. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers referred to as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
All virtual private server accounts which our company provides are made on physical servers that use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is included in the info cloned on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will stay online as all the information will still load from at least 1 more drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be saved on standard disk drives that also function in RAID because we would like to make sure that any kind of website content you add will be safe and sound all of the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.