RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
All of the content that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the data which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that your information is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Hosting
If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server plans, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any chance of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also use regular hard drives which work in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.