RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
All content which you upload to your new website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup 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 content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is changed, the information that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we generate virtual private server employ high-speed NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites significantly. The drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of many different drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without any loss if a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your info will be saved on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your site content at all times. With this particular setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on multiple disk drives.