RAID
Discover the pros of having your sites and applications hosted on a RAID-enabled web server.
RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all 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, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
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RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites within a
semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID fails as the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one quickly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each and every file.
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RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate
VPS servers function in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is changed and the information that will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the correct data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of unforeseen hardware malfunction.