RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on a number hard disk drives which operate together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into individual ones via virtualization software. Either way, the same info is saved on all drives and the main advantage of employing such a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this special drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the data which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your data is intact. During this process, your sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
In case you use one of our virtual private server plans, any content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID breaks down, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ conventional hard drives that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.