RAID
Discover the pros of having your websites and apps hosted on a RAID-enabled web server.
RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disks which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. In any case, the very same info is saved on all drives and the key benefit of using such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.
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RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The disk drives which we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you add to your
shared website hosting account will be kept on multiple hard drives and at least 1 will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without any service disruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.
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RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The information uploaded to any
semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the Internet sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. That is done so as to ensure that the info which is being copied is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.
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RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we create
VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the information which will be cloned on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the required data is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of unexpected hardware malfunction.