RAID
Discover the advantages of having your websites and applications hosted on a RAID-enabled hosting server.
RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on multiple hard disks which work together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same info is stored on all the drives and the main benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also enhances the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.
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RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your
semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that your info is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.
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RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we generate
virtual private server work with high-speed NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites significantly. The hard disks operate in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the website content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, your info will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this kind of configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on multiple disk drives.