RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of 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, and many others. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Web Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content which you upload will be saved on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID fails since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to another one immediately without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The SSD drives that we use on the machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the information which will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the required data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of unforeseen hardware malfunction.