RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some 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 will continue working effectively until the malfunctioning 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 will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we set up virtual private servers work in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive fails, it is changed and the info that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the correct information is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any type of unforeseen hardware failure.