RAID
What's RAID? How exactly does RAID work? Find out about the benefits of having a RAID-equipped server.
Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all operate as just one single unit where info is stored. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
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RAID in Web Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new
web hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the information 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 functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.
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RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a
semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is copied to a brand new drive if one of the disks in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a hard drive stops working, the system can switch to another one quickly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.
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RAID in VPS Servers
All
VPS server accounts that our company provides are generated on physical servers that employ NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the information cloned on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the accurate data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will still be online because all the data will still load from at least 1 other drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the info will be kept on standard disk drives which also work in RAID since we want to make sure that any sort of content you upload will be safe and sound at all times. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.