RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all 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 so on. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data kept on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the data that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud web hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with high-speed SSD drives which will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The disk drives work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the website content without any loss if a main drive fails. If you use our backup service, your info will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your site content all of the time. With this kind of setup your info will always be safe because it will be available on several disk drives.