RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of a number of 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 configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled 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 so on. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
All content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content which you upload will be held on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID breaks down since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to a different one right away without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that we provide are created on physical servers that employ SSD drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one additional bit is added to the information duplicated on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the right information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will remain online since all the information will still load from at least 1 more drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be stored on standard hard disks which also function in RAID since we would like to make certain that any kind of website content you upload will be safe and sound all the time. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.