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 one single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Hosting
Our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all hosting accounts are created employs super fast SSD drives rather than the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so practically nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is one more level of protection for your info along with the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content you upload will be kept on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down since the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a drive fails, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which we provide are made on physical servers which take advantage of SSD drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the info copied on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the correct information is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your websites will remain online because all the information will still load from at least 1 more hard drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your data will be stored on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID because we would like to make certain that any sort of content you add will be risk-free all the time. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.