Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where info is stored. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all the drives is exactly the same at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be kept on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive fails, the system can switch to a different one right away without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The SSD drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers function in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the info which will be copied on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the required info is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sudden hardware malfunction.